Day 20

It is such a great feeling to know the quilt is almost finished! :-) The next step is to do the border. I took the light blue fabric and cut 3 1/2" strips.

Unfortunately, there was not nearly enough material, so I had to make another trip to the quilt store. On top of the extra trip, the new fabric had to be pre-washed, dried, and ironed, before it could be cut into strips.

Once the blue strips were cut out, I moved on to the outer red strips. Just like the other red strips, this would be cut at 1". When the material was cut, pieces were sewn together for the 2 long sides.

Then, the red and blue strips were sewn together. This would make it easier to attach to the quilt later on compared to having to do 2 separate layers. When the pieces were sewn together, the seams were ironed on one side and the front of the strips were also ironed flat.

Then I laid the quilt on my bed and pinned the border to the quilt to see where the edges needed to be cut.

When all 4 sides were pinned, I put the border over the rotary cutter and trimmed the edges, leaving about 1" extra on all 4 sides (which will be cut later when the border is sewn to the quilt).

The reason the border is not yet sewn to the quilt, is because the border cars have to be attached and sewn into place. With all of the turning required due to the curves of the cars, all of the quilt material would bunch up and cause problems in the sewing machine if I sewed the borders to the quilt at this time.

Even though this is just pinned, the pictures below should give you a good idea of what the lighter blue tie-dye fabric will look like next to the darker background blue.

The lighter blue border actually compliments the blues in the "black GT" on the crib side of the quilt, and I think it looks nice with the red strips on both sides.

With the borders pinned to the quilt, it was time to figure out where the cars should be placed. I curled under the ends of the border and red strip to imitate the diagonal edge that would be there once it was sewn together. This showed me how far down the border cars could be placed. Assuming that all of the long strips were the same length and all of the short strips were the same length, I only measured once, and then used that to quickly place the cars on the other strips.

The paper on the back of the fusible webbing had to be removed on all of the cars.

I also kept both sets of cars separate as the colors were slightly different. Then I lined up the cars on each strip using my ruler, and ironed them into place.

Each side of the quilt will have the same color order, so I made 2 of each strip look identical.