Pieced Border Trunk Show and Lecture Gerry White September 9, 2019
At a quilt show, Gerry overheard a visitor commenting to her friend, “... most of the quilts just seemed to have a plain, single fabric border rather than adding something more interesting.” This inspired her to want to share her experiences and what she has learned regarding pieced borders. At the meeting, Gerry spoke about and demonstrated how adding pieced borders helps frame, enhance, or enlarge a quilt in more interesting ways vs simply adding plain borders. Although Gerry does sometimes use plain borders, she suggests pieced borders as an option we have that serves to add a lot of visual interest.
Carolina Chain - Bonnie Hunter quilt from “Addicted to Scraps”. Diagonal set quilt where
the setting triangles work as a nice frame for the quilt. I especially like to
do this where there’s a lot of piecing in the blocks making up the quilt.
Bonnie’s quilt pattern finishes like this one with no additional outer
border added, but, if I had wanted it bigger, I would have just added a
plain border.
Mystery Quilt - Took a “mystery” quilt class at a local quilt shop. I had the blue tropical
floral fabric and my original intent was to use that fabric to pick my colors
and to use as the outer border. However, it was a mystery quilt & I
added o the quilt size as given by the instructor, but oops ran short of
the floral fabric when it came time for the outer border. I solved this
problem by added corner stars to the border on 2 opposite corners. I
think it adds much more interest to the overall quilt.
Railfence Quilt - The random placement of Ohio Star blocks combined with random cut
squares & rectangle adds visual interest to a rather plain quilt. The
random squares & rectangles make sizing the border to fit very easy.
Yellow and Blue Pinwheel - My quilt looks nothing like the pattern I’d started with. The original
pattern was designed by Helen Weinman and Mary Hamblin of
Heartbeat Quilts in Hyannis, MA. The pattern, “Soft Surroundings” was
published in the September 2008 “The Quilter” magazine. I originally
had a nice yellow & blue striped fabric that I planned on cutting into wide
sashing strips as featured in the pattern. My blocks & this fabric just
didn't work well together so I did my own pieced sashing treatment that
forms star cornerstones & by carrying over to the outer edge. I liked the
way this finished the quilt without any need for additional outer border.
Partridge Christmas - Chain of parallelograms border. Showing this quilt to demonstrate the
importance of contrast in the pieced units. This border might have been
much more effective if there were more contrast in the parallelogram
units, color & pattern wise. For example, either the gold or green fabric
would have added much more contrast. It’s a shame to do all that extra
piecing and have it blend together too much.
Make your Point Scrap Quilt - Pattern found in American Patchwork & Quilting magazine; June 2005,
designed by Mabeth Oxenreider. I loved the overall design featuring 16-
patch checkerboard blocks offset with pinwheel blocks, inner dogtooth
border, checkerboard outer border and mitered, scrappy spacer strips.
Rocky Road - This quilt shows an example of bringing a portion of the quilt pattern out
into the border to complete the overall design. I’ve seen this technique
used often with quilts containing a “chain” type block where a portion of
the chain block is incorporated into the border to complete the “chain”.
Hawaiian Quilt - I like to use Star blocks for large scale florals. Picked up 6 yards of this
great floral fabric in Hawaii a few years back. I had made another quilt a
number of years ago with a floral fabric and always liked it so decided to
“copy” it. Don’t know about where the pattern came from or if I just
combined the star block with the other block myself, but I do know I
added the multiple pieced borders on my own. This one features a
chain of squares border and a checkerboard border, both of which I like
to use in quilts. However, I want to share a tip that I use all the time
when making either fast flying geese or chevron blocks which leads to
the next quilt.
Basket Quilt - Pattern is my variation of a quilt designed by Roberta Horton “Baskets
for Usha” featured in Quilters Newsletter Magazine, June 2003. I’d been
wanting to make a quilt similar to this for awhile. I used the “leftover”
star point 1/2 square triangles from the Hawaiian Quilt (each basket
required 7 1/2 square triangles for the handle and I had 8 from each star
block). Roberta’s quilt uses some evenly spaced nine patch blocks with
sashing strips, while I did a full checkerboard using primary colored
batiks. I also did my own sashing treatments in the body of the quilt by
bordering each basket with the bright pink and then sashing &
cornerstones. The basket fabric was leftover from another quilt and tied
all the colors together.
Basket Quilt, Back
Square in a Square - This quilt pattern came from Sherry Hodge. It’s a great scrap quilt for
using a lot of small squares & strips. I had a lot of leftover strip pieces
and thought a piano key border would be a nice compliment to the quilt
top. I mixed the thin leftover strips with other leftover strips of various
sizes which made the border very easy to size as needed.
Feathered Star Medallion - I took a feathered Star Class with Marsha Mccluskey a number of years
ago. After full day, cutting pieces to 1/16” (which is really difficult to see
on a ruler) then trying to accurately piece let to completion of 1 & 1/2
star points. For the birds!! I then took a class in 1998 with Nancy
Johnson-Srebro and managed to have a whole block complete at the
end of class. I put that away with all the fabric as I really didn’t want to
piece several more of these to make a wall hanging or quilt. This quilt is
a great example of what to do with an Orphan block and also carries
over nicely to panels. Add one or more pieced borders and plain
borders to make a medallion quilt. I just looked for border ideas and
worked outward. This quilt was custom quilted, beautifully, by Concessa
Shearer. I think this quilt was finished around 2004-2005. Good lesson
for adding labels.
Sew in Love 2: Flying Geese - The pattern for this quilt, “Due South” was from Miss Rosie’s
Farmhouse Favorites book by Carrie Nelson. I thought it was a nice
pattern to use up some of the leftovers from the “Sew In Love” Block of
the Month quilt. I adjusted the size of all the geese & star units in the
quilt to be smaller than the ones in the original pattern as I was looking
to make a slightly smaller quilt. The pattern has a wonderful pieced
border treatment with flying geese blocks circling two opposite corners
pieced with random mitered rectangles to finish off the border strips.
Sherry's Quilt - I really like the border treatment on this quilt of Sherry’s which has a
unique construction. It’s a Kim Diehl pattern.