The Great Summer Mystery Quilt #7

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The Summer Mystery has now finished and the instructions have been removed. However I have left the tutorial here for you as there are a lot of good tips and tricks in the last 10 posts – just use the category to find all posts. You can now download the full pattern as a working Quizzle from here.

So you have a quilt top? Doesn't it look great and it wasn't too hard was it? the final steps to finishing the top are the borders.

Firstly you need to measure across the quilt in both directions. Its not that I don't trust you but you should always do this just to make sure so that you don't get wavy borders because they are too big or pulled in corners because they are too small. So you always measure across the middle of the quilt in both directions. If you were perfectly accurate your quilt top should measure 51 1/2" in both directions. If they are not then you need to take the average measurement (add the two and divide by 2) and cut the following borders to match. Mine are okay so we will continue as if they are 51 1/2".

you can chain piece again here to save thread when joining all of your strips together into one long strip. snip apart and press the seams in one direction. Then cut them into your four border strips using the measurements above.

Pin mark the ¼, ½  & ¾  way points of the 51 ½” long borders and the sides of your quilt top.

fold the strip in half and then half again. Place a pin at each fold (3 of them - at the ¼, ½  & ¾  way points)

do the same on the edge of your quilt top.

Why do we do this you ask? well you measured across the centre of your quilt but sometimes the edges are a different size due to inaccurate piecing, cutting or bias joins... so we need to distribute the excess or shortage of border strip evenly along the whole side of the quilt top.... you may want to just lay the strip at one end and happily sew along but what happens if you get to the end and you have 6" left over or even worse 6" not enough?

Pin together matching these points.

lay out your quilt top right side up and then place one of the shorter border strips right side down with the raw edges even. match where the pins are and then pin along the entire edge about 6" apart. Tip: place the pins with the heads extending from the edge of the quilt.

(note in this pic below my pin heads are inwards on the quilt - don't do it this way, turn them around - I did after taking this pic)

  Sew the borders on using a ¼” seam allowance. Press the seam towards the Fabric C border.

When stitching have the quilt on top and the border strip underneath. This is so you can make sure that stitching line goes through your junction points for perfect points and also so that any excess border strip (if there was any) can be taken up by the feed dogs and distributed evenly.... now your pins are underneath but because those heads are poking out you can just remove them as you come to them. (note, if your quilt top edge was larger than the border I would probably do it the other way around) Ideally of course both are exactly the same length.

repeat the above with the opposite side of your quilt top. You now have a top and bottom border. Now we are going to do exactly the same thing with the two remaining sides of the quilt and the two remaining border strips.

Pin mark the ¼, ½  and ¾  way points of both the 54 ½” long borders and the top and bottom of your quilt top. Pin together matching these points. Sew the borders on using a ¼” seam allowance. Press the seam towards the Fabric C border again.

There you go, one more border to go next instalment - you are so close now...

hugs, Helen

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