Splicing border prints

 When Randy (Barrister's block) and I went to Maine in June, Wendy (the Constant Quilter) who is a most wonderful hostess directed us to her friend Cindy who has great quilt shop, Busy thimble, in Litchfield, Maine .  Cindy was having her annual 30% off sale and she has a fabulous range of fabrics!  Randy and I definitely spent more than a few pennies!

Lucky me I found an old French Laundry Fab that made a perfect match to a center of one of my UFOs.  And it was on sale!!!!  The print has two distinct bar prints running the length of the fabric.  Being the thrifty person I am I did not want to have to cut 4 full bars to make everything match so I ended up splicing the last border so's to conserve fabric (for what project I have no idea).

So here's an easy accurate way to splice a border pattern:
First I looked at each end of the cut fabric to see which end might have a better "match".   This one was pretty close.

I folded  and pressed the left piece of fabric, which was already cut to the correct width.

That  way I could lay it onto the  end piece and match up the pattern as perfectly as possible.

It helped that there were three printed lines that I could line-up.

Once I got the overlap as close as possible I used my ruler and wood marking tool to score a mark in the right hand piece of fabric.  You can just see the mark near the tip of the tool if you focus in on that point.  This marks the actual stitching line.

Then I opened the fold on the left fabric and matched the fold line to the marked line I made in the last picture  with lots of pins and I stitched along the fold line.

It's not entirely invisible but it's pretty close! 

Here's the end result.  The center was a hand full of 'leftovers'  but with that border it made a pretty nice lap quilt!  

I finished putting the binding on today.  

I'm feeling pretty good about my new UFO program.  

 I did a fair bit of sewing this week and I managed to refrain from starting anything new!  I occupied myself with a few borders which  so I have a couple more quilt tops to add to the "to be quilted pile" and ai have a "finished Finish"!

Two down and a couple more hundred to go!

Have a great week!

cheers, CW