I finally got around to putting the borders on Serenity. As you can see, the greyish purple isn’t an exact match for the colour in the teal print, and the Black Amethyst fossil fern in the outer border is slightly brighter than the fabric in the blocks, but it works well enough.

That’s as far as it’s going to get for a while. I have a very specific vision for the quilting which will take a long time and require a very large table, so it will be some months until I can get started. I do have the thread, though – a gold Rasant that is slightly brighter/yellower than the tan I used in Koi to Neru and which I hope will pick up the gold accents in the fabric.

If anyone had told me a few weeks ago that I would be able to match fabric from twenty years ago I would have fallen over laughing … but that is exactly what has happened, and I honestly do think I’m the happiest quilter in the country.

In 2003 I made the blocks for this top, and in 2016 I put them together. Then the project stalled, because it needed borders and that was problematic, to say the least. I had less than a half-metre of each of the three fabrics left, which wasn’t even enough for a 2″ border. The teal fabric had been purchased in 1992, the pink in the late 1990s and the purple in 2003, so I didn’t think I had a hope of matching any one of them.

The thing is, though, that the purple fabric was Fossil Fern by Benartex. I knew that the range had been enormously popular when it was released and I’d seen a couple of bolts here and there in the years since, but only in pale or multicolours, never in the dark purple. About a week ago I was idly browsing the web and got the idea to search for Fossil Fern fabrics, hoping to find a little Etsy store that might have a yard or two in a colour that wouldn’t clash too badly. To my great surprise and delight, however, I found that Benartex has re-released it (or perhaps had never stopped making it) and, better yet, they still run the same colourways. I found a store in Victoria (A Little Patch of Country) that had the shade I wanted (Black Amethyst), ordered it over the weekend and picked it up today.

Look at this — the new fabric is slightly brighter than the old fabric but it’s very close and when it’s separated by the inner border (a grey-purple) I don’t think it will be obvious. (It’s been raining for a week and the cloud cover is pretty heavy today so the colours are a little bluer in the photos than in real life, but I think the comparisons are still valid.)

I guess the happiest quilter in the country had better get to work … :)