How many borders are right? It’s up to you! Don’t you love it? It’s your quilt and as long as you’re happy with it, you can have 1 border or 100 borders — whatever you want! Let the quilt be your guide. If you look at your quilt and find that it looks like the borders are overpowering the quilt, make the changed needed.
Because I love borders, I often use fewer blocks in order to have room for pieced borders. When I was making Peaches & Dreams, I had it planned to have 8 borders.
I knew that borders #1, 2 and 3 were going to happen as planned because those were the borders prior to the pieced border. I had to get the quilt to a multiple of the size of the squares in that border. But after I got the pieced border done, I was so ready to stop. Maybe I could leave off border #5.
NO! That didn’t look good at all. Do you see how it just looks like something is missing without that lighter orange strip in between the pieced border and the next narrow orange border?
Maybe I could leave off the next one.
That does nothing for the quilt. In my opinion, the narrow orange border, which is Border #6, needs be there. Maybe I could leave off the 6th and 7th borders, making the next to last light orange border more narrow (which is the same thing as making Border #6 wider and leaving off the last two borders.
That would work ok but I think it looks much better with all the borders. What the quilt really needed was all 8 borders, don’t you think? See how the darker orange border creates a frame for the blocks in the quilt, then frames the pieced border, then frames the entire quilt? That’s the look I like!
My advice is forget any preconceived notions you have about how many borders you need to use. Add however many or however few borders you feel enhances the quilt.
