This is why you MEASURE thrice, cut once...

One of these day's I'll learn.

For side two of the signature quilt, I went "free form."  I was not worried about widths of the various strips between signature blocks, more that they looked pretty even.  The end result was that two were substantially shorter than the others.  Now, the best time to fix that would have been BEFORE adding the sashing strips, when I could simply have sewn a little wider seam allowances.  And definitely BEFORE trimming the sashing strip even with each column.

So - if you look carefully at the top left corner of the picture, you can see where I hacked off most of a strip, and didn't catch on until later that it was also uneven.  It was not until I started to measure for the binding strips that I realized just how badly I had messed up the lower edge of the quilt. Fortunately I had gone to be before making another mistake that might not be fixable.  What I ended up doing was opening the stitching on the sashing on either side of the signature blocks - as they could not be trimmed without losing names, and then shortening the column by trimming some of the coin above the block and/or re-stitching the seams above to shorten even more.  NEXT LESSON  - MEASURE!  Yep, you guessed it, after cutting and sewing it back together, I suddenly had several short columns.  At this point, I did what I should have done earlier and added another coin to the column to even it back up.

By the end of the evening, I had resewn quite a few of the seams around the signature blocks, and then to add to my joy, did not notice that the bobbin thread ran out 8 inches into one of the border seams until I was about 8 inches from the other end of the seam - and of course, the careful pinning is now gone...

 The first borders are now attached and Monkey has provided her seal of approval.  Next up the pieced scrappy border.  That should be lots of fun!