BOMs Away Monday - "Down the Rabbit Hole" Goes BIG

Welcome to the link-up for BOMs Away Mondays!

Where we share what we're doing on a BOM-type project 

so they don't stall out in UFO-land!

(Linky at the bottom.)

A new month brought me back to my Rabbit Hole quilt top, where it was ready for the Month 9 work that starts all the applique on the big rabbit border. 

This is Lisa Palmer's pretty rabbit - I love it and want to start right in on making and finishing my rabbits.
But first I'll have to figure out what all extra applique "stuff" I'll add in to fill my extra-wide border.

I really want this quilt on my bed, not the guest bed, so that means I had to figure out how to increase it into a king size. I also really like the diamond border on the outer edge, like it is in Sarah Fielke's design. 

This is Jane Shaw's amazing top, so you can see the diamonds I'm talking about.
That is one big dog. This is a big quilt top, something like 96 inches.

That meant I needed to insert many inches at the applique border. Well, I only barely had enough fabric for the border as designed, so I had to make my border two-toned. Hey! Keep the blue and add some green - sky over grass! I'll have to flip the rabbits around from Sarah's orientation since the blue has to be on the inner side of this border. It'll work fine, though, since this border will hang over the sides and foot of the bed. Making this a two-tone border, though, threw another factor into the "Figure It All Out" mess since it would be better to do mitered corners.

So this morning I pulled out the directions for that diamond border and wrestled with the math to figure out how much to add in that border to get to where however-many added diamonds would match up in the measurements. 

I had it all figured out for my best-choice of finished quilt size. . . and then I was short about 6 inches of yardage for the green fabric.  Oh, pooh!

Back to the math again, but it wasn't so tricky this time around, as I already had the common denominators. So I found an acceptable smaller size and then set to work making my actual borders.

I forgot how long it takes to put large borders together! So this is all the sewing work I accomplished today. (All four are stacked here.)

Because of the mitering, my pretty powder blue (looking rather peakish in that photo) was a little shorter than the far reach of that color's corner. A little patching made it work fine, and applique stuff can help hide that seam a bit. I don't know if you can see it in the picture, but I used the blue erasable pen to mark the diagonal seamline. These borders have an extra 1/4" on each edge to accomodate the ocassional pull-in that can happen with applique. So that line gives me something to eyeball while placing elements on the background. 

I was super careful with all my calculations, and even more careful with my cutting and marking, so hopefully - cross our fingers - when I have these all worked up and do the final trimming, it'll actually fit together as it's supposed to!

~*~*~ Did you get any BOM type work done at your place recently? ~*~*~

Kate over at Katie Mae Quilts has joined me in hosting this meet-up,

and linking up from either end puts you on the party at both sides.