There is life after cutting

Just to prove that I made it past the cutting - I have updates!

First - the cording. Look! I'm making my own cording! It CAN be done. And not really as hard as I anticipated. After umpteen miles of quilt binding, this is not much different. And I used a fusible 'steam a seam' to eliminate a row of stitching that I'd have to hide later.
Granted, there are 5 yards of cording that had to be made - but it went rather quickly.
The tricky part is adding the cording to the panels. With so many layers, a regular pin just won't do the job. Instead of pinning in a normal fashion, I just had to shove the pin straight through. Remember when I saw that reviewers had warned against blood loss? Well, now I understand. These pins sticking out all over the place creates a nasty little death trap of pricks and pokes. I learned my lesson and did not even pin that silly cording onto the second panel. I just lined it up as I went along and it worked out just fine.
So...slowly but surely - progress is being made.