KF Diamonds: borders added

The quilt center is all sewn together, and today I added the inner border and chose the outer border fabric. Here it is up on the design wall: the blue outer border is still in raw pieces.

This isn't what I had planned. First off, I was going to use the darker chevron stripe (more red/brown than pink) for the inner border. Turns out this one works better, and is possibly not quite as obnoxious as I'd feared it would be.

For the outer border I was going to use Dancing Leaves in orange or Big Blooms in red, mostly because I have adequate yardage of those two. But my finished border size will be only 4: Big Blooms was just too BIG (blooms would not show at their best, so why bother). Dancing Leaves has a very strong repeat element and I would have had to waste a huge amount of (pricey! Kaffe Fassett!) fabric to cut the borders from similar enough parts of the print that they wouldn't look all lopsided. Oh well. Probably I'll use that fabric for the binding when I get to that stage.

So I grabbed my stack of Kaffe quilt books (eye candy! inspiration!), retreated to a lounge chair out on the deck, and leafed through them, looking at border treatments and hoping the perfect solution would either appear or bubble up. I briefly considered piecing a border from alternating red and blue prints in 4" squares (a size my dwindling stash could handle), but at this point anything other than minimal piecing seems like too much work. So I had the idea to do "random" strips of a few close, medium-tone, medium-size prints in blues. This neatly solved the problem of how to make a border from what's left in the KF bin without having to piece more than a little bit.

Back in the sewing room I pulled out these three... Clouds, Lake Blossom, and Asian Flowers (not sure those are the exact names) because they combine the blue and pink colors prominent in the center. The asian flowers is on a dark brown ground, but it goes well enough. I cut 5" strips of each fabric, then cut them down to random generous but not too long lengths, and slapped 'em up.

Voila! Perfect! I didn't even have to tweak it!!! Someone slipped something good into my creative juice today. I look forward to sewing this up, but might take a day or so to just leave it up as is and admire it, and think how clever I am to have come up with this solution... plus, I have some other stuff I need to do.

BTW: I took a whole bunch more photos, including some closeups, and this is the ONLY one that was in focus. This is a frequent, recurring problem. Perhaps I should invest in a tripod??