My Stress Relief Quilt

Last year was a bit stressful for me. A quilting friend suggested that one way of dealing with the stress was to get on the sewing machine whenever I got home. Everyone was getting sick of my I've-had-a-shit-day stories. She said that I should work on some simple blocks to unwind - not something difficult or precious! It was a great suggestion and really helped.

I had been saving scraps from projects for years. Anything that was cut into a nice strip, square or triangle plus some pieced bits have gone into my hoarding bag. The middle part of the block is made just picking up pieces and sewing them together.  No measuring or rotary cutting involved until the piece of fabric is made big enough (150mm by 240mm in this case). For some reason, it's easier to make rectangles rather than squares using this process. Then I heavily starch the block and press well to get it to lie flat. Once it lies flat it can be trimmed back to size.



I added the green frames after I had destressed!  That was not simple.  It didn't help that I cut the light green strips at 70mm wide and then realised that I only had enough dark green fabric to cut 50mm strips. That made the mitred corners very awkward but it looks good and was worth the fiddling to get it right.

This is going to be another community quilt.  We always need good 'boy quilts'.  It's easy to make pretty girly quilts but some of the recipients of our quilts are teenage boys. I think this would be nice for a young boy (maybe not a teenager when you see some of the fabrics) and I have this striped fabric that I would love to use as a border.  The only think is that it's floral.  The first border is a dark brown and I think that one is ok. So is the green border and it doesn't even look like flowers.  It's the third border I'm not sure about.  I love it and I also love the red bit - but would it look right on this quilt? Opinions please!