A Very Happy Border

I started on one of my tops yesterday. The construction on the 1st floor is winding down. Today & yesterday the carpenter was laying the wood floor. Chips of the subflooring were occasionally falling onto my head as I was sewing this. I am most happy to be getting things back to normal. Now, if only school wasn't 8 days from ending...(sigh)

I probably don't have the restraint to keep the quilting on this quilt only limitted to snippets until it makes its way to it's first show (targeted for the fall), but we'll see. So far I have only stitched out most of the top 7-1/2" border. Tomorrow I get to dive into the body of the quilt. It's a tremendous departure for me in terms of style and colors. Blue is not my norm, nor are non-traditional, non-symmetrical quilts. Despite the juxtaposed highly symmetrical border, the quilt ought to stitch faster since it will be done predominantly free-handed, with limited ruler use. I'm still hoping to throw in some of the tricks I picked up at MQX, both from my classes, and from staring at 200 awesome quilts.

My borders are symmetrically asymmetrical. Is that an oxymoron or what? I will have opposing corners of the quilt with a scalloped border, so I have made the borders themselves different too. I make a very clean and what I think is high-quality binding, but I am in search of those missing judges points, so I am thinking outside of the box so to speak, hoping that this variation might catch their attention. The title of this quilt is "Sea Glass", so the border quilting was designed to mimic waves. Some of the space in the picture below is still not stitched. Or I should say I am on the fence as to what I want so rather than stitch, then pick, then restitch, I am waiting. It will likely just be a filler of sorts.
At this point, I am extremely happy with the progress, even if this 3.25 square feet of quilting took 5-6 hours to stitch.