We all have our own unique styles when quilting. My mom's is of the quick and easy variety. She likes projects she can finish quickly and that look amazing. I on the other hand am known among our Pack to not only take, but seek out the most complicated patterns and projects. If it’s too easy or too fast, it’s just not as fun! I think this is a result of how I learned to quilt. I started when I was 14 with my Aunt Linda who invited me to a Saturday Sampler. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept, most Saturday Sampler’s work from a similar template. You attend a class once a month and get the fabric and pattern for one block each month. Most stores have you pay say $5 for the first kit, and if you come back the next month with a finished block, you get the next kit for free! At the end of the year you have 12 blocks, and if you kept up with the blocks, you only paid 5 dollars for all of it! Anyway, back to the point, Saturday samplers are usually a little more complicated than your average first quilt, and I jumped in head first and never looked back! I loved every minute of it, and even though those first quilts were far from perfect, and there was my fair share of seam ripping, tears and frustration, it taught me to always push myself to the next level and never settle for good enough.
The other thing I learned from Saturday Samplers is to hoard every scrap of fabric. We saved each and every left over bit from those kits, and at the end of the 12 months, we had 12 finished blocks and a stack of scraps to create our borders with coordinating fabrics. Here is my first Saturday Sampler that I finished when I was 16 (don’t do the math on how many years it took me to actually finish the thing!). The sashing was very simple on this quilt. All my energy went into the border, but it was worth it!
This is the close up of the borders. Don't look too closely, as I've said, this was my first quilt.
My next quilt was also a Saturday Sampler, from the same place, The Nine Patch, which is closed now. This is one of my favorite quilts because of the amazing colors! This time, my energy was focused on the sashing.
I know this is a pattern somewhere, and I have seen it since, but at the time, it was just an idea in my head, and I put it into my quilt without a pattern.
You can see how I sewed the sashing on each block from this selection.
With both of these examples, you can see how much the extra fancy boarder or sashing can really make your quilt pop! I know that once you finish your blocks the last thing you want to do is think about a complicated border, but trust me, the end result is well worth it! After you put so much effort into the blocks, why not put as much effort and love into the borders to create a unified effect across the whole quilt? Plus, what else are you going to do with all those scraps? Well….I have a few ideas for that as well…but that’s for another post.
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