Getting Somewhere on a Snowy Friday

It was 13 F when I drove Drama Teen to school this morning.  It was 19 F when we went to lunch.  It started snowing about an hour ago.  Thankfully, I'm taking the day off.  So other than those two outings, I've been able to stay home and hang out in my warm sewing room.  

This morning the last border was stitched to the  2014 Rainbow Challenge Sampler.  My usual border is to just find a matching print and add that as the border, but I wanted to do something different on this quilt.  The sashing is black and I didn't want to just finish the quilt with black borders.  In my search for inspiration I came across one of those books in my quilting library that had set on the shelf for who knows how long.  

  

I remember buying this book, it was supposed to inspire me to make more pieced borders.  Mission accomplished (finally!).  To be honest, I didn't make the exact same border as shown in the book, but made a slight variation so I didn't have to paper piece the blocks and narrowed the border from 6" to 4".  I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. 

There is still a lot of black in the borders, but they are not solid black.  It was an easy border to modify as I didn't have to deal with coping strips and figuring out what block size would work best.  Now I just have to make the back and get it sent out for quilting.  This was one of those projects that I wasn't sure would come together but has become one of my favorite quilts.  My Guy on the other hand made the comment at lunch that it looked like "something where  miscellaneous blocks that were blowing down the street were collected and then stuck in one quilt".  He has never been a fan of sampler quilts. 

Getting the borders made were my February goal for a Lovely Year of Finishes.  It feels good to make this goal since I failed miserably last month.  Since the border was inspired by one of my quilting books, I'm also linking up with Vroomans Quilts for this month's Let's Book it Challenge. 

We are supposed to get snow, followed by freezing rain, then rain between now and Sunday.  I'm hopeful that means lots of sewing time this weekend.  If you live in North America, stay warm, stay dry, drive safely.