5. Flying Geese Americana, page 2
With the geese strips completed it was time to make that final decision about the sashing. At first I cut one blue star strip and just laid it between two geese strips ---- didn't like it, too busy!
Putting a 2-inch border of background fabric on each side of the sash gave me what I wanted -- it made a great workspace for the fancy-stitch quilting I wanted to put on either side of the dark sash.
It also showed me that I needed to incorporate the same star pattern in the border to really frame everything together.
Which just naturally led me to deciding to duplicate the striped border on the back to match the front.
The more I studied the striped fabric, the more I saw potential to make everything "organized".
That's a hot-button for me, having organization of some kind in everything I do.
The width of the fabric had 5 repeats of blue stripe with white stars. I needed three strips of only the narrow blue with white stars (plus seam allowance) at 36" for the sashes.
But I also needed 8 wide strips (wide enough to include the red stripes and red with white stars, plus seam allowance, and long enough to extend to the top of the mitered corners, for borders on front and back).
Once framed (mitered corners and all) the only thing left was the binding
By that time I knew using anything from the strip would be overkill. Using the off-white background would invite dirty edges (I hate white binding on quilts).
Found some solid red that matched close enough.
I finished off with a spare amount of quilting. The fancy-stitch run on each side of the sash took care of the inner area. A single row of stitching around the perimeter --- set one inch in from the border --- gave it an outer shape.
My plan to "stitch in the ditch" around each triangle was abandoned for the sake of leaving enough "clean space".
The combination of multiple prints in the Americana theme, and the wide stripe around it, was just enough --- not too much.
