Quitathon update for Sunday

I decided to forge ahead with the nine-patch quilt today. Ultimately, I chose to layer each half of the quilt without borders. My logic is that I can always add the borders on to each half later if I should decide it might work out better. But, once I cut my long border strips in half, I am stuck with pieced borders.
Quilting will have to wait for another day, but I am sandwhiched and ready to go! :)

Same quilt, now with fabric!

This weekend is another quilt-a-thon hosted by Judy L and I am trying to get a little something accomplished. So far, I have my blocks stitched together from the quilt I have been blogging about for the last couple posts. I think I am going to try to quilt it in two pieces and then join the pieces together, because I don't have my Handi-quilter frame set up right now. (My tables for the frame are in use by others right now.) This is what it looks like at this point.

The border is not attached, just pinned on the design wall for effect. I can't decide if I want to add the narrow inner border or not. Right now it is missing mostly because my design wall is not large enough to accommodate another border. But I'm not sure it is really needed anyways.

But my real dilemma is this- I don't know if I should quilt the two halves before adding the borders or if I should add the borders to each half and quilt them before joining the two halves of the quilt together. If I add them first, they will have a seam through them. If I add them last they won't, but I will need to manipulate the entire quilt through my sewing machine to do the borders. Does anyone have any experience with quilting in pieces? I would love some helpful tips from someone who has done this before.

Edit: I just noticed that I have a mistake in my quilt top. Do you see it? One of my alternate blocks is turned the wrong direction. Oops! Funny, but I didn't notice it before. I guess I will need to make a little adjustment. I sure am glad I found it before I started quilting.