The fabric I ordered finally arrived, and I have been able to get back to my Popsicle quilt top. But before I get to the finished top, I wanted to talk about sashing.

In general, I really don’t like sashing. Mostly, I don’t like sewing sashing. But I also find that sashing tends to really disrupt the design of the quilt. I think you can get a lot more movement and interest out of smashing all your blocks together instead of setting them all apart in their own little islands of sashing. And, like I said, I really dislike sewing sashing. So boring. Yuck.

I am aware that some people really like sashing and they use sashing in pretty much every quilt they make. As my father would say, different strokes for different folks. Maybe my dislike of sashing is inherited. If you check out my collection of Family Quilts you’ll see it’s pretty rare!

Admittedly, I have made a quilt or two with sashing. Even one of the designs I sell (Greek To Me) has sashing. But that was a special case where I felt those blocks really needed to be separated. Kind of like Bettas. They fought too much when they were together.

I thought the Popsicle quilt might be a similar case.

I mocked the blocks up in Illustrator in all kinds of configurations and really thought I would need to do sashing for this one. So, I made up a few blocks and tried out all kinds of sashing colors. In the end if there was going to be sashing, it was going to have to be something kind of neutral.

This is what I do when I’m testing out colors. I throw a bunch of stuff up on my design wall and look at it. Sometimes I leave it up there until the next day and look at it again, narrowing down the options.

I eventually decided that this light tan was my sashing of choice. But I just couldn’t get excited about this. Maybe what I needed was… to ditch the sashing? Let’s try it!

Okay, so that’s more like it. As it turned out, I thought this was WAY improved without the sashing. But when I went back to my calculations I realized that without the sashing I needed to alter the size of my blocks to be not quite as tall, otherwise I was going to end up with a very strange size.

This is the Popsicle Dreams top that is now complete. The colors in this last photo aren’t that accurate — they are much better in the other photos above. I am SO glad that I decided not to do the sashing in the end! Once this quilt is finished and photographed, this design will be available on my web site for sale.

Incidentally, I had the name of this quilt picked out before I even started doing the mockups in Illustrator. Sometimes the names just come to me and I go with it!