January UFO finish

This is my UFO finish for January.  After languishing for 2 years in my "to do" pile, I finally loaded it up and quilted it.  I already showed this quilt once, but I wanted to post it again with a bit more of it's history.  Looking back through my posts, I started it the weekend of January 17, 2010, so it was almost exactly 3 years start to finish.

When I started this quilt, I made one block to be sure I knew what I was doing.  The pattern called for tri-recs rulers, but I didn't have those.  I did however have a kaleidoscope ruler, so I figured I could use that.  It would make the traingular bits I needed just fine.  So I went ahead and made a sample block.  And realized to my chagrin that the triangle pieces came out the wrong size - narrower than the pattern called for.  However, being stubborn, I decided to redraft the center block in the star and use my "mis-sized" blocks anyway.  Of course, that meant that I needed a few more blocks than originally called for.  So this quilt was a bit of a "design-as-you-go" project, despite coming from a magazine.

I had this all done, and then had to take the borders off because I had mis-measured.  Actually, what I did is calculate the borders based on the size the quilt should be.  But my 1/4 inch seams are never perfect, and the quilt was about 1/2 inch narrower and 3/4 inch shorter than expected - so my borders were too long.  Foolishly, I thought I could ease them to fit - but because the quilt is entirely on the bias, the quilt stretched and when I hung it up the borders waved.

So, after much debate about whether I could stretch the whole thing while quilting, I finally took off the borders and recalculated.  In order to keep the piano keys even, and preserve my nicely matched mitred corners, I added a narrow gold border before the dark brown one.  In the end, I think this improved the overall look of the quilt, so it was a good mistake :)

I'm linking up with "A Lovely Year of Finishes" this month.  Drop by to see what everyone else has accomplished.