Diamonds in the Garden (an unloved kit)

It's going to take me awhile to finish this quilt, so I thought I had best give it a name.

  I'm calling it Diamonds in the Garden (an unloved kit).

I started it about 10 years ago. It was a deep discount from Connecting Threads, a kit that was on their discontinued/sale page. I was a beginning quilter and I thought it would be a good practice quilt.  Ha! I was too busy quilting to finish this top.

When I cleaned out my studio last year I rediscovered it and wasn't any more excited about it than I was 10 years ago.

This was what I found:

  

I had all the diamond strips pieced and the rest was still in folded fat quarters and yardage!  I had long since lost (I probably tossed it) the pattern, but remembered that there were folk-art applique flowers meandering through the negative spaces.  They are easy to make, so I just winged it there.  I did all the applique and I was sick of it by then, so I put it away for another year.

April 30th, 2018, I decided I would publicly declare my intent to finish this unloved kit by using it as my May, One Monthly Goal.

I got out the fabric for the border and didn't like it at all.

  Still, I used it . . . and it's growing on me.

I used up all the border fabric and it made a huge 8-inch border.  I had precut the 2 inch blue binding as the pattern must have told me to to do....something I would never do today.

Still, I am not too excited about this top.  I just let it hang for about a week , it just doesn't look ready to quilt . . . should I cut down this large border? It just needs something!! 

I envisioned the matching blue binding just making another large blue square WAY out there at the end of that 8 inch border.

My brain must have worked on it all night, because when I got up, I knew I was going to scallop the edge and cut brand new bias binding in blue.

I had just the tool to make it happen. I bought this at my very first quilt show.  I bought a lot of stuff in the beginning that I have never used! 😟

But here we are, and I got it out and read how to use it.  The directions were pretty confusing and not enough detail for me to figure out how to divide my 91¾ x 69⅜ inch quilt top so all the scallops on the sides were the same size as the top and bottom....and how do I make the corner fit into the divisions?

Sheesh....I took Calculus in college, but this "easy scallop tool" was beyond me.

I Googled a video and it was simple, I just needed an explanation how to do the corners and where to start measuring.  

Here is the best video I found: Easy Scallop

Once I got the scallops marked, I also marked the piano-key quilt lines.  This brought me to another question, how will I do the corners?  If I fan the piano keys out around the corner, all 10 of them will start from the same inside point

which will make the quilt stick up like a tent when it's all done.  I decided, since this is a whimsical quilt, I will stick in a matching flower in each corner to make a larger place for the fan lines to start and stop. 

This morning, I quilted the top border and stitched-in-the-ditch the first sashing and first row of diamonds.  I used Dream Puff batting, as I plan to do a lot of quilting in the neutral spaces and want the diamonds and applique to puff.

I am getting a little exited to see where this goes!