The End of the Road... Road Trip 2016

Our 2016 Road Trip is over, and the summer with it! So here's one last look at the ride.We'll show you how we added our borders, and also how our Quilts of Valor are coming along. And if you make to the end, there's even a cute kitty picture!

In case you have been feeling tired lately, here's why! If we had actually driven this, it was 6,883 miles, or 109 hours and 6 minutes in the car. (I love MapQuest.) That side trip to Vegas was worth it, though, don't you think? 

But what we really did, was sew 212,750 stitches. If every stitch was a mile, we drove around the earth 8-1/2 times. ( I love math.) So that is definitely taking armchair travel to new lengths!

Now back to reality. Here's a quick photo tutorial if you'd like to add borders like ours. Just load the design provided on the Road Trip web page with 2 layers of heavy stabilizer in a 5" x 7" hoop. Pick two colors; one for the words and one for the stars. We used white, then blue. We made four of these in all for all four sides.

Unhoop and trim your pieces apart right on the stitched line between them. Cut them into 2-1/2" high strips. Then cut 1/2" away from the letters on each side. At this point, remove as much stabilizer as you can, and trim up any of the larger jump stitches between the letters.

Sew the saying together with 1/4" seam. 

Pick a corner accent fabric, (we used a navy blue with stars), cut two pieces 2-1/2" square, and sew one to each end of the piece; there's extra, so just trim it even with the sides of your main piece.

Do the same for the top border. Then the side borders are done the same way as well, except out of the corner fabric, you'll need a longer scrap, roughly 5" x 2-1/2," for the ends of the side pieces.
Voila! (I love saying, "Voila.")

If you are too tired at the end of this whole trip, just buy some nice red, white, and blue fabric, cut it to 2-1/2" strips and use that for a border. Or you could just make one saying for the bottom border and do the rest out of fabric. It's all about you. <3

We were SO tired after last year's trip, nothing ever happened with it! So this year, we plan to finish it. These big breaks in projects are something you may have noticed with your own work-- it's okay, it's just a bit of resting time before it becomes clear what the embroidery wants to be. Sort of like dough resting. There are no UFOs in our studio-- just resting dough.

Et Voila!

And look how impressive they look together! Makes us want to go ahead and digitize every city in the whole world, huh!

And finally, in between cities this Road Trip, we did get a few more star blocks finished for our Quilts of Valor-- that is what we will have when this project is fully baked. A little photoshoppin' here, folks, but honestly, we're pretty close to finishing one now that the centers are done.

And that makes it a wrap! We were going to post a picture of a sunset last to symbolize the end of the road for Summer 2016... but all we could really pull up was one of the office cat taking a sip of water from his teacup while the rest of us groveled on the floor with the above quilt blocks. 

If you enjoyed the road trip, please comment below with your first name, town, state, country... it's like carving our names in a tree when we all reached Seattle. Happy Fall! <3