Another Autumn Retreat in Marin brings the saga of my ‘Labor of Love’ Heart quilt closer AND (sigh) further from completion.

Let me start by saying that I almost finished the backing Saturday. Seems I only had a 24” x 95” piece of the burgundy left, so I split it for the two outside borders and pieced the middle with all the leftover 3-6” strips. It looks so nifty and could be a quilt on its own. Other quilters would say I was crazy to be putting so much work into a backing, so I decided this would be reversible! It’s a traditionally pieced design on one side and the modern stripes on the other. Yeah, I’m crazy.

My step backwards has to do with the heart front, specifically those bias squares-on-point & 1” borders. You see, after the backing was wide enough, I put a 2” border in burgundy on the top and laid the whole thing out atop the heart-front to see how much more I’d need for the bottom border. I’d been so thrilled this Spring, but realized that the wonky front corner just wasn’t going to fly. I consulted with Joan C, an experienced quilter, as to my options for the fix. First, she reminds me to measure the middle vs the bottom which turns out to be 6” too wide; then I could just systematically pleat the bottom and square it up. That sounded too difficult, so I decided to remove some borders and have another go of squaring it up.

Decision made, I set aside the backing to begin ‘Project border removal.’ I rip the wide burgundy border from the bottom, as well as halfway up the side. My tedious Sunday continues fairly well with the help of Joan’s ‘seam shaver’ and at the end of the day, I have a couple borders ‘true-measured’ and pieced back together with relative confidence.

Sigh, I’ll have to pick this up another time as I’ve run out of time. Stay tuned this Spring for another installment of my Labor of Love!