I had a busy week last week so besides all the cleaning and organizing I did for company coming, I did manage to get the blocks for the outer border made.

They are here.

If you are new here or have forgotten what I’m up to, I’m making this Lori Holt quilt called Mercantile. I’ve wanted to expand into trying to make hers, mostly without all the exact fabrics she uses simply because while I have some of her fabrics, due to where I live, it isn’t really practical to use her exact ones in every quilt she offers.

But I did not get them put together, nor did I manage to do anything more than that.

I will show you what I did do before the last post, though. The problem was that I forgot to trim the blocks down to 14.5” before putting them together. They were pretty much 15.5”. This makes my quilt larger than it should be. This means my outer borders won’t work without some adjustment.

I thought I would add a thin border and then the red. Then I would need one extra outer border piece.

Let me show you how that looks.

However, I’ve been uneasy about it ever since I did it. I’m not sure I like it.

I told you last week I’d let you know this week what I decided about trimming down the blocks and resewing them together.

I think I’m going to do that. I shouldn’t have to actually unpick the sewing because I should be able to just trim the blocks to 14.5” (right now they are pretty much 15”. SO I should be able to just trim inside the seam line and just cut it away. That will save so much time.

My husband is heading to Ukraine today and hopefully will be back before bedtime. He is just running our friend to a town inside the Ukrainian border. For those of you who are in the states and reading this - let me see - let me explain this. It’s about a 4 hour drive TO the border, but getting across the border takes between 1 and 3 hours depending on how fast they are moving the vehicles on through.

So, he is going to meet the person who will meet him and pick up Bruce and take him back further into Ukraine, about 1 hour on the other side of the border, then my husband will turn around and come back home. Not sure how long it will take but we have very long days these days. Our sunrise is officially 4:26 am and sunset is 8:38. It gets light about 40 min before sunrise (before 4 am) and dark just about 9 pm.

The day you read this, I believe I’ve pretty much decided to just cut off the red and outer border and cut down the blocks to 14.5”. I should not have to unpick - which will save a lot of time. Then I will sew them back together the right size this time.

I know it actually looks okay with what I did. However, I think I will do it this way mainly because this is my first ever Lori Holt quilt and I kind of wanted to do it the way she said to. Maybe if this had been my 5th or 6th, I’d think differently.

So, I believe that’s the plan. I will try to get myself up and going when they leave for Ukraine and see what kind of progress I can make on trimming and resewing the blocks.

Then maybe I can go ahead and put the outer border (the pieced blocks) after I cut more red and put that red border on. That would only leave me one more border. I’ve probably spent more time thinking about doing this than it will take to actually do it!

So thanks so much for coming along with me on this journey!

Have a great day wherever you are reading this!

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