Sweet River Studios

After quilting the background, I selected the border I thought would look best and got sewing. But I wanted a mitered border, which I've never done before. I watched several YouTube videos and of course they always make it sound really, really, easy and never once to they say "don't do X because then it won't work" or "watch out for Y." No. They simply say, "See its easy!" No. No it isn't. Mitered Corners The first step to mitered corners is marking your center panel. Mark 1/4" away from your corners in every direction. Sew your borders on the panel starting and stopping at the 1/4" marks. Once you get all 4 sides done, your borders will NOT be sewn down in the corners. All the borders are floppy and weird at this point. Lay all your borders flat out so that they overlap (sorry, I don't have a picture). Mark with a pen, on each fabric with a  little dot, where the two borders intersect. Next, fold your center panel...

I decided the open space area above mom's head needed some quilting. I didn't want to have too much quilting but I wanted to fill the space. The people will not be quilted. I decided that I didn't want to mess anything up and taking the plunge to quilt even the empty space was making me nervous. I've put a lot of work into the portrait and I don't want to ruin it. I thought a large 50 should go into the corner but what else? I had no idea and after looking through some quilting books to get ideas, I thought I'd use the Ohio quilt block pattern, which to me looks just like a star so I thought I could work with that. I got my projector out and got to work. Using the projector simply helps with placement and keeping things straight, which most people can't do freehand. So after I got them roughed in so to speak, I needed to fill the spaces in between. I didn't just want to do a meander stitch all over because I wanted a bit more of a design. So when ...

It took me a  while to figure out which 2 fabrics I wanted to border the portrait. I thought that since the center is a light colored fabric that I would have a small border (1") in brown then another (2") border in a lighter color after that making the center square 21". I also wanted mitered corners. I have never done mitered border corners but it doesn't seem all that hard and I always like to throw in an element that I don't know how to do. But before I get to the borders, I need to work on that lovely background. It's not a huge area to try to quilt and I may not wind up doing it at all but its seems like there should be something. Border Fabric My MIL and I went to our local quilt shop looking for fabric to put around the portrait. I wanted a small 1/2" - 1" darker fabric around the portrait and a lighter 2-2.5" fabric around that but they both had to work with the cream/applique blocks and the portrait. Picking out fabric...

Now that my practice piece is finished, I can move onto wall quilt. I didn't want to do a huge center portrait but I didn't want something super small either. So I settled on 18x18" but the applique blocks I want to put around the center portrait, can be done in 6" or 7". The 6" block says "finishes at 7" but 7 doesn't go into 18 evenly. Starting to see the problem? Of course you are! So that means the blocks have to either finish at 6 (which goes into 18 nicely) or I have to add a border around the portrait and end up with say 21, which 7 goes into. So I thought I'd add a mitered border (which I've never done before) around the center to add 3" making my center 21" square. Background Squares I also stitched out some embroidered background squares from the Feathered Star pattern, which came out really well. I stitched out 2 blocks. On the left, the thread is a very close match to the cream fabric and the one on the rig...