My Churn Dash update

 I know that Chooky gave us 4 months to do the blocks for this SAL, but I am happy to report that I am ahead of the schedule!! Mostly I am the "last minute" queen so am pleased to be ahead. While the top is finished, it has not been quilted and that could be awhile coming??

I had planned to make 25 blocks, set on point with setting triangles and borders. My 25 blocks were finished and so it was time to lay them out. Without even planning I found that I had almost the right balance of colours to lay the blocks out in some sort of order. I would have preferred not to have a whole row of the red blocks down the centre, but otherwise it really worked out quite well in balancing the reds, blues and the browns.

The next choice was to decide on sashings. I had planned to do 1 1/2" finished sashes within the onpoint setting. But trying to find a fabric from the remnants that would work for that was not an option. I did like the brown stripe but didn't have enough of that. So I then went to Plan B, and decided to do straight set blocks and 1" finished sashing....... which almost made the stripe enough. I did have another brown that might go with the stripe and with a bit of "patchwork" I managed to get all my sashings from both the brown fabrics........(this pic is the back of those fabrics).

So it was then time to sew the blocks into their rows.................with gold cornerstones..............

.................and here is the centre of the quilt top.........and those 8 'other brown' sashes blend in quite well I think.

Now to the border choices................. I had this border print in the collection of leftover fabrics and I wanted to use it. After all this quilt was all about using up the remnants from that other quilt and as it probably wouldn't play nicely with the other fabrics I have here.

I cut this into sections along the length and decided I wanted the border to be wider than these were...........

I started by adding a gold border to match in with the cornerstones............and then thought that a bit of red either side of the border print would be nice?.................. and stitched the first border on........

but wasn't very happy with that skinny little red strip.........(the red was from my fabrics and not a leftover piece).......

........so I unpicked that and went to Plan C, or was it D?? And made the red strips wider...........

;

.....and was still unsure... ..... was that too much?...........So then went to the next plan..........and cut the first red the same width as the gold?..............and sent photos to a few distant friends for their opinions..........as well as asking Raylene and Joy who were here.

The decision was to go with the last option above........... and now I needed to unpick the border I had already stitched, as well as to make 4 corner blocks as that fabric was going to be too hard to mitre the corners...(and I had no intention of mitering that directional border print). It was getting late in the evening by this time, as I had done my fair share of unpicking until the final decision was made. I was tempted to just put a square of red or gold in the corners, but decided I should do 4 more churn dash blocks.........

.....now I had an odd size border width to work with, and the blocks needed to be 7 1/4" unfinished.

I am not used to be working on a quilt without knowing where I am going, as it is usually all drawn up and decisions made in EQ before I start........but I did go to EQ and put in the block size I wanted to cut these 4 churn dash blocks..............and found some remnants that I had enough of to make 4 blocks........ and here is the first pinned up to see how it worked..........all good......

..............so I made the 4 blocks.............and decided it was time to call it a day, or actually a night........and then when I pinned it up in the corner of the quilt, I could see that it was tooooo big!!!!! Can't trim it to size, I wouldn't have any points left!! How could this be, as EQ is usually very accurate with the measurements??

I decided to sort it out in the morning............and went to bed, but the mind was thinking about it all and trying think up a solution...............and by the morning I had worked out where I had gone wrong, ....NOTE - WHERE I HAD GONE WRONG, NOT EQ,  and thought about the answer............which was to UNPICK the blocks (lucky I had an unpicking fairy too), and trim each section to the size it should be.......... and look how much I trimmed off.............

.......and now I had the perfect churn dash blocks that fitted perfectly!! Note to self, check your size of each unit BEFORE you sew them together......

..................and the top is finished!! 

I still have this basket of odd sized bits leftover, so they will go into the scrap drawers to 'play' with  other fabrics

That's all folks! One day it will get quilted, probably with an allover pattern.

Blessings, From Jude