Canning season

I finished putting together the top for the mini "Canned Pears" quilt.

I decided to go a little rogue and put two of the leaves on the right instead of the left.  

The checkerboard border seemed like it should go together quickly, but it actually took me all day.

I thought I had been clever by cutting up any scrap pieces as I went along into the small strips that were needed for the checkerboard.  After the pears were assembled, I had a tidy basket full of strips ready to go:

I strip-pieced all the small segments into longer strips

then I trimmed them apart, and started sewing them together again

and so on, and so on....

After many ups and downs to the ironing board and the cutting table, I had only these:

It was barely enough for one side of the border.

See, I only thought that I was being clever.  Turned out it was much more practical to go back through my fabrics, and cut a strip from each one, pair it with a background strip and cut away...

I did end up using the pieces I made in the beginning, but it went much faster after I started cutting new strips.

Something else that should have made things easier, but for some reason was hard for me is that the pattern calls for the inner border to be cut a little extra large so that it can be trimmed down to match up with the checkerboard.  You can see in the photo that I trimmed a little off the top and bottom to make it even with the side borders:

In my excitement to see how it looked, I sewed the side borders on before I made a similar trim to the other 2 sides.  It took some fussing to figure out how make the top and bottom checkerboard border to work out,  but I got it eventually.

Anyhow, it's a really cute quilt, in a color palette that was very new to me but that I might just have fallen in love with.