Borders on the Scrappy Double Irish Chain

I got the Scrappy Double Irish Chain sewn together and pressed this evening.  I auditioned several different borders.  The dark blue one was just too plain.  The one with reds and purple was only okay.  I tried white and then 4-patches.  Not quite right.  Playing with the 4-patch units, we sort of filled in the outside edge while placing a white square in the center of every other block.  That did it!  Here's the quilt sewn together...

And here's a black and white rendering of how the border will look.  I need 726 more 2" squares.  Of those, 23 are white.  I have only a very small bit of white left.  I hope I have enough!

The border is actually 3 squares deep.  The block matrix looks like this:

DLDLD

LDLDL

DLDLD

Alternating with:

LDWDL

DLDLD

LDLDL

And the corners:

DLD

LDL

DLD

And:

LDL
DLD
LDL

Twenty three of the first 2 and 2 of the second 2.

I think I zigged and should have zagged!

Usually, when I sew blocks together, I lay them out first, then pick up all of the blocks in rows after flipping the second row onto the first one.  I didn't do that with the Scrappy Double Irish Chain.  It is only two blocks!  I guess that would have been okay if I had gone ahead and made one stack of blocks rather that working from two.

However, I didn't.  I took me until I got to the last row to see what I had done.  I layed the quilt on the floor in the media room.  I don't know how, but Cooper heard me!  I did manage to keep him off of it!  Yep, sure enough, there was a mistake.  Lucky for me though, the entire row was off.  That's great news because that means that nothing is wrong.  The rows aren't sewn together yet.  I'll just snip the chain piecing threads and put the quilt together in two halfs, then sew the two together.

I ended up having to lay this out downstairs as it doesn't quite fit in the media room.  The quilt is 83" x 90" without borders.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet for borders.  Any suggestions?

Strings!

My string bin is overflowing! 

For the past eight years, one of the quilt guilds that I belong to sponsors a retreat.  I teach classes Friday night, Saturday and Sunday.  It's a whole lot of fun!  The theme for my classes this year was SCRAPS.  I've been doing a lot of scrap quilting lately.  It amazes me what I can make out of bits of leftover fabric.  My Friday class was on organizing your scraps.  Sunday's class was on putting them to use.  Saturday's class was on Selvage quilts. 

As the ladies were cutting their scraps, several of them left me their strings.  Others made their way into my room.  I brought my AccuQuilt Go! Cutter and let everyone try it.  More strings!  My string bin was overflowing when I left home.  It still is!  I took a little down time today and pieced these three blocks.  I only had three foundations marked or I probably would have made more.  I had 20 blocks or so already made, so these will be added to those.  And I marked the rest of the foundations, so I'm ready for more string blocks when the mood strikes me.  I found that I have a lot of short strings.  And narrow ones.  I think I will have to look up a pattern that puts those short strings to good use.  The Phonebook Quilt I taught last year was great.  I'm thinking maybe a Spiderweb block.  I'm not sure when this will get into the quilting agenda though.  Perhaps I'll just start a new string bin for now.

Here are a few photos from the retreat.  I showed several scrap quilts. Here they are layed out on the table for a "bed turning".  The top quilt is one of my selvage quilts.  You can see my pink selvage quilt in process in the center of the picture.  This is probably the layout that I will use.

This is the table set up in the auditorium.  We tried some different things and I think it worked much better.  Most importantly, I have some ideas for next year that I think will work out very nicely.

My pink selvage quilt in the works.  One of the ladies rearranged it to this layout.

Here are a few of the ladies.  We had about 42 people there.  Several didn't get in the picture.  Some had already left.  I'm in the first row, second from the left.  I'm wearing a tee shirt that says "Got Scraps?"