Semi-Sampler Quilt gets a Border

I hadn't intended to add anything to my little sampler quilt top - even if that did leave it at an awkward size: too big for a hanging decoration, too small for a baby quilt. But, a few months of thinking on it and I decided just to go for it and make it a little larger.

I picked up a little bit of coordinating yardage, and what I thought was matching solid (it looks slightly darker to me, but I'm going with it anyway), and just did a simple border of each around the outside. This should have brought the quilt top up from 31x41 to about 36x46. Still not very large, but closer to a size I feel works for a baby present, in case that's the route I want to go with this one.

I know these pictures aren't the greatest - even for me. With the daylight hours getting shorter, and my work days getting longer, taking photos is getting a great deal more challenging. I took these about 45 minutes before sundown - and minutes before it started raining.

The print I chose for the border wasn't my first choice - but my initial plan didn't work out for the front, so I had to go with my second choice fabric on the front, and my first choice on the back. I haven't yet figured out the back - but I'm going to use at least part of that first choice fabric in it, and probably everything I have left of the solid dark grey. But that's a project for another day.

This project has been a little bit of an accident from the beginning, coming together with no real plan, so I have only myself to blame for this - but I do wish I'd planned far enough in advance to pick up a blue to use as the border instead of playing up the reds, which already seem fairly dominant in the quilt top. I do think that adding the border was the right choice, I just would have liked a chance to see what it would look like with a different color choice. Maybe next time I won't wait until so late to decide I need more fabric... Hmm.. maybe I'd better pick up some more for those future projects, just to be safe, right?