Finishing Up the Floral 9 Patch....Borders

Thanks so much for your sweet comments on my last post....I really appreciate them!

Summer is waning, and so my floral extravaganza needs to be finished to clear the way for the new direction that autumn always brings. By now I've covered every seam in the Floral 9 Patch and today added its cotton velveteen borders.
With great good fortune I had followed my nose (via Deb Geyer's blog) to some of Sharon Schamber's You Tube demonstration videos, and so this morning I paid close attention to her four-parter on creating mitered borders. Part one is here. While I did not follow her exact process, she gave me a couple of key insights that literally saved my bacon with this quilt.
I knew that trimming my 28" square quilt would lead to disaster due to beads and stitches being in the way and fabrics becoming too ravely once that protective zigzagged edge was sliced off in the squaring up. I knew I would not be able to sew on my border with the machine, either, without seam lines getting very wiggly due to heavy nearby embellishment, causing me much gnashing of teeth.
Sharon Schamber to the rescue, God bless her!

I have appliqued on my borders before but was never satisfied with the straightness of my border's sewn on edge. Sharon irons on freezer paper to the back of her border, leaving a 1/4 inch edge...

....and then folds her to-be-appliqued edge over the freezer paper. This was Key Concept Number One. Lots of you probably have done this for years, but not me!
Of course, Sharon pre-shrinks her freezer paper, and she paints starch along the edge before ironing, and she sews her borders on by machine..but this is velveteen and I didn't think starch would be such a good idea. It is also why I am ironing on a towel here. And we already know machine sewing is out.

Next she runs a line of glue along her folded over edge...(see how totally uneven the edge of my quilt is, and how trimming it would have been suicidal? And by the way that white backside of the velveteen is interfacing. The freezer paper has been removed.)

...and then she smooths her borders into place, heat setting the glue with her iron. Key Concept Number Two: Glue it, don't pin it. Her method, using flat and submissive cottons, is much more exact than mine, but the concept was priceless for me on this go-round. I could line things up perfectly without having to trim anything, and in a much more secure way than by employing a long line of pins, which would have marked up the velveteen as well.

Halleluja, square corners!!! Once the four border pieces were glued into place, and each corner mitered by simply folding over one edge at 45 degrees and gluing that....then all I had to do was whipstitch the borders on there by hand with some fine silk thread. This was a piece of cake and I am so happy with calamity being avoided. The borders look smooth and even...and are going to get some cording added to them tomorrow....!