Thank you so much for your responses to my border question. There will be more of those coming up in future posts. It’s fun and quite educational for me to read your comments. When one reader terribly dislikes one border, another reader will think it’s perfect. You never have to worry about hurting my feelings . . I’ve read judges’ comments on my quilts after quilt shows and survived those! 
Since I’m pretty much self-taught when it comes to piecing, designing, color, and even quilting, I learn a lot by reading your comments. When I’m designing a border, I try to include a portion of a block that was used in the body of the quilt. What may start out as a portion of the block my “morph” into something totally different. Once I think I have an acceptable shape, whether it be squares, triangles, rectangles or a combination of that or any other geometric shape, I begin adding color. All three of the borders below are the same exact combination of squares and rectangles, just different portions of them are colored differently.
It isn’t very scientific (but who cares about that anyway) but one of the easiest ways for me to get a good feel for the borders is to do like I did last night and put three of them up on a blog post. Some blog posts you see and some you don’t see. I can then go to my BlackBerry, where each quilt is about the size of a peanut and I can see all three quilts at once. On a screen that size, I see which borders stand out, which borders blend too much, which ones I look at and see only the border and not the main quilt. Without the BlackBerry, I can bring all three up side by side like this:
They may stay up on my computer screen all day, or I might print them and look at them off and on for several days. The more I look at them, the more I can distinguish my likes and dislikes about each border.
On these three borders, I roughly tallied the votes fairly early this morning and more have voted since I counted but here’s how they came out:
Quilt #1 - 12 votes
Quilt #2 - 52 votes
Quilt #3 - 18 votes
My choice: Quilt #3. In the end, what matters is what you like . . what pleases you. You can see by the votes that there’s no right or wrong response. Someone loved and someone disliked each of these border choices. I think it’s more important to enjoy the process than to stress over making sure you have made the perfect choice. There really is no perfect choice — it’s all in what you like!
