Medallion "Borders Made Easy"

 I've been working every day for an hour or two on this quilt. The last quilt-in-the-ditch border is a piano key design, so named for the strips used and sewn together to resemble piano keys. The one I used I nicknamed an "offset piano key" border because it resembles black and white key piano keys. 

You can see the quilting-in-the-ditch design I decided upon in the photo below, second from right, even though it's a bit blurry.

Basically it's two trips around the border with lots of turns using the machine's "needle down" feature. It took about four days to do this, a little every day. There are two borders that will have designs using Borders Made Easy, a product from "Quilting Made Easy".

I discovered this product by chance looking around at several quilt store websites. It comes with 26 feet of design and four corners in each package. The designs are rated by difficulty, the 100 level is for me, a beginner in sewing machine quilting. And it's very easy to fit the design to the length needed since the sides of the roll are sticky: you can just cut, reposition and re-draw lines (if needed). 

Just don't stitch over the sticky parts according to the instructions. The corners are just pinned...no sticky stuff on those. Sewing these easy borders is done with a regular foot: no free-motion quilting. I chose an open toe foot to make it easier to see the solid and dotted lines on the paper.

This design is four trips around the quilt on each side. It took about and hour and half to do. Then you just pull off the sticky sides first and then remove all the other paper pieces. I didn't find this a problem since I'm used to doing this in heirloom machine sewing. As a matter of fact, this particular paper is easier to pull off!

Here you can see the sticky borders are removed with just the center left to do. I have one more border to do. It's wider and on the cream Kona cloth so my stitching will have to be really good. I think I'll save that for next week, along with the binding. I can't wait to finish this quilt and move on to other projects!!