I made a couple of TV covers for my friend who has an Airstream and wanted to cover up her TV’s with some textile art and add some colour to her space. It was a little over a year ago that I made the pieces for her. Then last fall she went and bought a larger TV for the living area and moved the original living area TV to her bedroom. Now she has a small TV cover from the bedroom that won’t fit the new TV in the living area – what to do! Of course she says Jen can you possibly make the small TV cover larger and I said of course I can.
I retrieved the small TV cover from her and set to work. I might add it is one of my favourites and by the time I added on to it I liked it even more.
We decided that a purple border was needed and after taking measurements for the new TV I set out to find just the right purple. Originally I thought I would use batiks – purple and a bit of orange and had the ones in this image to work with but I didn’t feel they were quite right.
I of course had no more of the flower fabric. I looked through my stash which is really lacking in purple fabric and was no where near my quilting buddy at home to sift through her purples which is her favourite colour so I asked another friend who loves purple what was in her stash.
She had many purples and I found the two most perfect purples and asked if I could permanently borrow some. The one was directional so I had to put a bit of thought of where to cut it and how to match it up. The outer border with the moisture of light and dark purple as well as grey seemed to be the perfect fit.
The first decision was how to construct the piece – I had two options. Option one was to create a whole background and then applique the original piece to the top of it. Option two was to remove the binding from the original piece and then piece the borders onto it. I went with option two.
Then I needed to make a decision about where the original quilt should sit in the frame – centre or off centre? We went with off centre which meant the feature fabric would be varying widths all the way around.
I also decided to make the piece a bit longer than the TV otherwise the proportions were going to look funny. After drawing a sketch and figuring out what size to cut the pieces I set to work. Three borders – real skinny orange border – ¼” finished, skinny light purple border – ½” finished and varying widths for the outer border.
How do you make sure that the skinny borders are even and not wonky?
I sew the first inner border on and then when I sew the next border on I sew with the wrong side up so that I can run my ¼” foot along the seam line. I have two different quarter inch feet and you can see that the one on the left is a bit wider and so the seam line runs on the inside of the foot toe whereas the one on the right runs along the outside edge of the foot to create a ¼” seam. Plus the needle of the machine should run along the raw edge down the middle. By sewing these narrow borders this way it makes for a much more even and precise border.
The same can be done for the next light purple skinny border which is ½” finished border using the foot on the left. This time the raw edge will run along the inner edge of the left toe of the foot.
Time for quilting. I did stitch-in-the-ditch for most of the quilting especially along the seam lines of the grey background to hold the 6 layers together – yes 6 cause remember the original quilt was already quilted which is 3 layers then I added another piece of batting and a backing fabric. The outer border I stitched along the curved lines of the fabric with thread that blended in.
The whole piece was finished off with the light purple for the binding. I took it back to my friend and we both agreed it looks better than the first version.
Sometimes a border can dress something up and give it that pow or pizzazz that it needs to look sensational. The contrast of the orange and purple with the multi grey background just makes everything pop. Are you interested in learning more about adding a wow factor to your quilts? I have a trunk show all about contrast and adding that WOW factor to your quilts. Please let your guild program people know about it so they can book me to speak at your guild.
Until next time,
Happy Quilting
