Exploding Sunbursts Tutorial: border

How to make the wonky borders:

First of all, cut two strips in half. Now you have four strips which will correlate to the four sides of your block. (Some of you have three border strips. Just ignore the third one for now.)

Lay the strips of opposite colors exactly on top of each other on top of your cutting mat, lined up neatly. In this picture, the blue is pulled back so you can see that the green is exactly underneath it.

Make cuts through your strips. They can all be angled the same direction (like I did on my first quilt block), go in different directions; be close together or far apart; acutely or obliquely angled. Just remember to make them different from each other so it doesn't look like you were trying to make them even. Cut the two strips differently.

Now separate the strips that you cut together, making two border lines. The blue and green will be exactly alternating.

They look like this when laid out.

Now you need to sew your strips together. Since this is not a straight line, you have to off-set the two pieces from each other. There are many descriptions of how to do this, and some techniques call for marking a dot 1/4 inch from the edge of each piece. I find it simplest to eyeball it, realizing that the line of your sewing (e.g. Where the needle hits) should be right at the intersection. The picture angle isn't perfect, but ideally the first stitch once the needle starts sewing will be at the intersection of the two colors.

NB: It doesn't have to be perfect! In the final step, you trim the edging, and that will neaten up any uneven edges (up to half an inch). So if your edging looks a little wavy at this stage, just keep sewing.

Of course, if you get any elbows sticking out at totally random directions, you'll need to rip the seam and try again. It wouldn't be quilting if you didn't rip out a seam now and then, right?!

Here is the first strip sewn together, and the second one laid out ready for sewing. I'm not worrying about the ears at the edges or any slight unevennesses (there are some!) because it will be trimmed later.

All four borders sewn together. Trim to 2. 1/2 inches wide, by taking a little off each side.

Arange your borders around your sunburst block. The borders are longer than your block, so you can decide what part of the border matches up. In my first block, I tried to make the color wrap around each corner. In this one, I tried for some interesting angles with the blue as it went from one side to the next. This leaves more or less hanging off the corners.