Originally Posted by
QuiltnLady1
-- Do you measure down the center to get the length of the border or do you just lay a piece of fabric down and sew on the border, cutting it afterward?
I measure down the center to get the length for the side borders and sew those on, easing where necessary to make the quilt and border match in length. Then after pressing, I measure across the center of the quilt to get the length of the top and bottom borders and repeat the process.
-- Do you ever fudge the width of the border a bit to get the quilt the size you want?
You can make borders any size you want. Especially when you're working with pieced and whole borders, you often have an "odd" sized plain/whole border to accommodate the pieced one.
-- When you piece the border (with stars, flying geese or ...), do you adjust the size of the blocks or do you put in a "fudge factor" of a plain strip somewhere in the strip so everything comes out even?
If the difference is very small, you can simply ease the longer of two parts onto the shorter so that they come out the same size. An inch is easily eased in the large king-sized bed quilts that I usually make. I haven't done a lot of pieced borders, but the quilt I just finished has a narrow 3/4" plain border, a 1½" sawtooth border, then a 6" border with contrasting corner blocks. If something hadn't fit, I could have adjusted with a strip of plain cloth, or I could have adjusted the 3/4" border to 1/2" or 1". This "floating" strip is adjusted a lot more when one of the subsequent borders will be made of larger blocks.
-- When you do mitered corners -- do you stitch all your borders together so you only have to do the miter once or do you miter each individually?
The next quilt that I'll finish will have mitered borders and I plan to sew all the strips into border units, sew them to the quilt and then miter the corners.
-- Have you every used left over strips of random widths in a piano-key-like border and did you like the affect?
Yes, I like this effect very much.
I also like cornerstones, corner blocks, mitered corners, lapped corners - whatever looks nice. I've not used prairie points - yet - but I love the look of them.
Here is a quilt I did with the piano key border: