Auditioning Borders

A border can really make or break a scrap quilt.  When I had the quilt shop customers frequently came in for help in choosing a border for a quilt and we were always happy to pull lots of fabric to try out.  I always think it’s a good thing to not have your heart (and mind) set on a particular color or print for a border until you’ve auditioned several fabrics.  You really can’t know ahead of time which one will really make your quilt sing!  Since I use so many fabrics in scrap quilts it can sometimes be a challenge to find the right border fabric. Sometimes a fabric that I think will be perfect for a quilt just falls flat. I’ll often pull 20 or 30 fabrics to find one that truly accentuates the pieced center.

This is an example of a border that just doesn’t work. 

The colors are good, but the print has too much light fabric and doesn’t coordinate with the center.  Even the inner border is distracting.  That’s the biggest reason this is still in my UFO pile.  I’ve contemplated  taking the border off and either replacing it or leaving it off completely.  It’s partially quilted though so that would be a pain.  What I think I’ll do with it now, is just bind it, donate it and move on.  Really that’s the most sensible option.

A couple of weeks ago, I made this charm quilt.  Originally I had planned to use a little tone on tone dark green print from the same line as the charm squares.  I wasn’t crazy about how it looked and then I found this printed plaid in my stash and now I love the quilt.  The border just adds so much to it.  I just need to hand stitch the binding and it will be finished.

This morning I finished piecing this chained rails top.  I’m still not liking the chain fabric too much.  It just didn’t have enough contrast, but I was too far into the project to change it.  Again, I’m just going to move forward, finish it and give it away.  I’m hoping the borders will help it out a little bit because it is a nice quilt otherwise.  Here are a few fabrics under consideration.

There is a lot of green in the quilt and I thought maybe a green border would work but this one is kind of ho hum.  Next I tried a brown but up close I didn’t really like the print.

I usually really like plaids for borders on scrap quilts.  I thought this might be a perfect fit because the quilt has a lot of blue and red.  It doesn’t work because of the light in the plaid.  The quilt doesn’t have any other fabrics that light.

Brown was still my top choice so I tried a dark brown.  It looked pretty good but I still thought there might be something better.

Red wasn’t a color I had even considered but I saw this fabric and I think it’s my top choice.  It’s a little black and red homespun plaid check.

I’ll add a narrow black stop border, then the red check. 

I’ll get the borders on and quilt it then show a picture of the finished quilt then you can decide if I made a good border choice or not!