Quilt Borders

Today and yesterday I have been determining the specifics of the star border.  I originally wanted a gradient, but my first attempt didn't work too well because the white fabrics looked to similar to each other.

Additionally, there seemed to be too large of a jump in color between the white and blue stars.  I tried adding in a pale lavender star and adding an additional darker shade of blue.  I also did a row of just alternating white and pale blues.

I even tried bleaching the blue fabric to get an in-between blue shade (not the best idea...)  You can see the bleached fabrics below, with the original on the left and two shade of bleaching on the right.  They looked nice when placed next too each other but stars made from the in-between colors once again just looked too close to the white.

Once I had decided on my colors I laid out the entire quilt to double-check that they looked okay.  However I decided the string of stars looked a little short (first picture) and so lengthened it (second picture).

Once I was happy with how things looked I cut out enough stars for the second bracket.

And below is the final border!  Stars haven't been ironed on yet just in case I change my mind.