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Barbara Brackman Grandmother's Choice, blocks, cats, coping strips, Grandmother's Choice, Making out with BoB, Miko, piecing, quilting, sashing, UFO. WIP
Grandmother’s Choice is now DONE! Done-done. Done with a binding Done. Complete as shown. Done.
One of the big reasons for my BoBs is my participation in swaps. I’ve found that even when the participants are excellent quilters, sometimes the blocks are just a little bigger or smaller than they should be.
In the case of Grandmother’s Choice, the quilter was me, and they all should have been the same size (or, to put a point on it, off by the same amount.) Unfortunately, that was not quite the case.
Rather than trimming off the edges, possibly cutting off points, etc. I used what I call “coping as sashing.”
This sense of “coping” comes from joinery and is the method of shaping one piece of wood so it exactly fits the piece next to it.
This was one of the smaller blocks, so it got wider coping.
The blocks weren’t off by much, so I simply sewed a slightly larger border on some of them than others. Then I trimmed all the blocks so they were the same size.
I matched the corners, treating the blocks with their borders “a regular block” and abutting them rather than using a traditional sashing.
In the current BoB, In Full Bloom, some of the blocks are off by as much as 1/2″, so the variation in “sashing” will be much more noticeable, but the corners will match and the wonky whole will look like I planned this from the beginning.
If had used same background fabric for all the blocks, say unbleached muslin, I could sew coping strips on the smaller blocks to “extend” those blocks and simply cut them (after sewing on the coping strips) to be the size of the larger ones. Then I could use traditional sashing between them if I wanted.
It would look subtle enough for anyone except a quilt show judge (and how often do they look at our quilts?)
Miko has chosen her first quilt.
But, I kind of like the checkerboard effect that I got with Grandmother’s Choice, so I’m coping with In Full Bloom in a similar way: each block will have its own fabric border in green, and I’ll get the checkerboard effect by alternating light and dark greens.
Quilting, Piece by Piece 