Usually I don't mess with borders but, when I do, I end up LATE :)

"The products featured in this post were given to me by Island Batik"

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April's Island Batik Ambassadors Challenge was all about borders and once again was a real challenge for me! I don't know why but I don't mess with borders, to me borders are a mystery area that sometimes belong to my quilts, because not all my quilts have borders.

So, like I say to my students... You will never have ideas about an apple if you don't start to think about apples. And I started my project exactly like this, through the borders (I know... first time ever).

Most of the times I design my quilts on Eq8, but this time because I had no idea and it was more a sketch than an actual structured quilt, I decided to use the procreate on my ipadpro.

Just kidding! I was just trying to create a good contrast between the border's design and the rest of the quilt!

I really liked the piecing plan, the quilt is about 38" "square", not a real square because of the shapes of the border's design, but for you to have an idea of the dimensions.

So now I just needed to appliqué the entire tree, plus, almost 60 leaves and 7 flowers... My deadline made the birds fly away and also the wind blow some of the leaves, because sometimes you need get things done! #letsdothis

For the batting, I used Hobbs Heirloom Premium 80/20 Cotton/Poly blend, my favorite, and because I honestly didn't know what to expect of the points of the border. I had no idea how flat and balanced the quilt would be after quilting, so I decided to use my most familiar type of batting.

I decided to make a "faux binding", so I quilted until 3/4" away from all the borders (first image below), than did sew a line around the entire quilt that is the 1/2" binding line. But the quilt has no binding at all, it was sew together by hand after I turned and pressed 1/4" all the edges in both sides top and back.

And here we go "The Secret Garden" all finished!

See you in a couple of days, my post at the Island Batik Blog Hop is on May 5th! (and I will not be late)