French Braid Quilt

So the woven jelly roll rug got me going, and I pull out this quilt I had bought while still living in Phoenix and started earlier this year, and then I got busy and put it away and forgot, well almost forgot about it.  The problem I discovered is the directions are missing something, cause it is uneven (it angles up from left to right).  It's sort of hard to see in the picture but take my word for it. So I took it apart and trimmed it, like the directions said to do, and well it still does the same thing but now it looks like steps.  I probably should have just trimmed it when I took this picture.  My reason for leaving the zigzags was because I wanted to put a trim around it, and I thought that would create an interesting design.  Back to the drawing board so to speak.  Since I am currently working on this, I will post another picture after I get the strips sewn back together again and trimmed again. In the picture to the right, you can see, I'll need to cut another 4" off the design to level it out.  I hate wasting fabric :(.

Ok, I finished trimming, and then sewed it back together again, and then trimmed some more, (note to self, must make something from the scraps) It now looks more landscape than portrait.  I added a black batik border, that really brought out the colors, but I needed it to be a bit larger, cause I wanted more than a lap quilt.  So I added a strip from the fabric that was suppose to be the back. 
 
As you can see, it now almost fits our king sized bed.  My husband says that if only it were about 3 inches longer here and here, so I'm adding another black batik border around the outside edge.  Hoping it will look like a mated frame.

I now also need to decide what I want the back to look like, it was going to just be one piece of fabric, but I'm not sure if I have enough of it left.

So we tried it out on the bed to see the fit, the husband didn't want his face in the picture so all you see is his cap. :) 

 

On the right is the almost finshed front piece of the quilt.  I ran out of the 6" wide black batik, so I took what I had left and cut it in half, then I noticed I had some left over from the middle border, which just happen to be the same size (3") so I will be sewing another strip to the top of this which will make the frame really pop out.

I have about 8 yards total of each of the fabrics. Not enough of each to only have one color, so I'm using my eq6 to fabricate a design using both.





This is what I came up with for a design.  I'm thinking about trying to use some of my cut away pieces in a sort of crazy quilt block  in the middle.