width of borders on wall hanging and small quilts

[Margaret J.]

I am making a small wall hanging 13 by 24 inches and want to add two borders. Is there a formula as to figuring what the correct width of each should be according to the original size. I would appreciate your help. Thank you!!

[Nancy R.]

What I do is lay the quilt center on top of the border fabric in the corner, leaving just the possible border width of fabric between the edge of the quilt center and the edge of the fabric so the fabric basically looks like the attached border. Then I step back and look at it. I'll move the quilt in and out until I get a width that I find pleasing. Then I measure and that's my border's finished width (so I would add 1/2" when cutting to account for the seam allowance). If there are multiple borders I lay them all together in the same way until I get the widths that I like. That's also how I pick my border fabrics so I get the best idea of how it'll look.

No formula, but I hope that helps.

[wendy w.]

If it's pieced I make the border in multiples of the sizes of the blocks or pieces in the blocks. For picture quilts it's governed by the width of the pieces I have left and Nancy's method

[wendy w.]

One good way to figure out the width of a border is to use the golden proportion, golden mean or phi. It is something that is intuitive to some people...they can just see it, while others need to to a little math.
Here is a link to a post Jinny Beyer wrote about it. I was in a hand piecing class of hers and she showed us the calipers she designed and put them up to the borders and blocks on her quilts. It was amazing...she designed the quilts with out the calipers and her proportions were right on. Some people just have "it".
www.jinnybeyer.com/blog/the-magical-golden-ratio/[/url]

[Judith A.]

Sometimes I like to use the Fibonacci sequence, especially for multiple borders. I don't think I can explain it in words. But it sure works well.

Judith

[Kathryn S.]

That is fascinating- I saw her calipers in the first lesson on her craftsy class. I'll have to check this out further. I've just used the "try it and see method" with my quilts to pick border sizes. Perhaps our intuition leads us to select those golden proportions? Kathy