The Most Difficult Quilt Top I've Ever Made!

Pretty unassuming as far as pattern difficulty goes, right?  A simple Log Cabin, right?  NOOOOOO!
The fabrics are really pretty and they were packed in a nice little straw bucket with a Chinese symbol on the front. (I guess it was Chinese- I only speak Oklahoma so I don't know for sure!) It was a really neat kit, I thought, when I bought it at Market Sample Spree a few years ago but it's been here at my "shop" inside our grocery store for at least 2 years and no one has even looked at it except for the lady that wanted to buy the bucket for a "purse".

Monday this week was a holiday for everybody except the self-employed (us).  It was v-e-r-y slow here at the store for all the time except the lunch hour. Stan has his Stan-wich following, you know. So I spied the kit & decided it was time to get it off the shelf.

Why would it be hard to create, you ask? Here's the fabric group: great fabrics-

 and HHHHEREEEE is the fabric KEY:

So far so good, huh?  So I started cutting the pieces & labelling each fabric group with the SKU so I could find it again. Started trying to sew it together..........Step 1 wasn't too hard to find the right fabs. But look at the set of directions!  Look how the "key to the colors" makes all the diagrams look!

Clearly, the colors used in the diagrams DO NOT correspond to actual fabric colors!

  I've thought of

at least 2 additional reasons excuses for why this was so hard.

1)  The space where I squeezed in my Janome Gem behind the counter is REALLY small

so it must have cramped my thinking capacity! 

or....2) Being interruped ever-so-often (wonderful customers!) might have derailed

my thinking just enough that I

had to rethink the whole thing every time I started to put blocks together.

Fortunately, I DID get 'er done, I DID get 'er done!  Whew! and Yippee!

There's fabric left for the binding but I think I'll see about adding a solid black border first. What do you think? border or no border?