Shady Lanes - now for the borders

All the blocks and rows are joined making a 72" x 72" top and the bulky seams pressed into submission with a heavy hot iron and a little elbow grease.  Now I'm auditioning fabrics for some simple borders.  It's too big for my design wall, so I laid it out on the kitchen table.

I tried a plain dark border next to the blocks and didn't like it.  Then I remembered the 288 bonus half square triangles and threw in a few for a sawtooth effect.  Liked that a little better but thought it needed lightening up a little so added in a strip of the neutral between the quilt blocks and the sawteeth.  Ahhh.  I liked that much better.  But it all felt a little blah and dark.

Then I remembered that Grace of City Mouse Quilter Blog suggested a red zinger.  So I pulled out some different red hues to see if I like the effect.

The brighter red I tried first didn't do a thing for me.

Neither did this one.

I auditioned a red/pink remnant.  I  have just enough for a narrow frame around the entire quilt and wouldn't mind using this up because it's been in my stash forever and has been used a lot of projects. There's a lot of pink and purples in the scrap squares so this one surprised me by playing really nicely - much more so than a pic of just this much quilt can properly display.

I also liked this darker red very much.

I've narrowed it down to the last two and will leave it all laid out on the kitchen table and walk past it a few dozen times while I mull it over.  Adding this many borders is going to make this one queen size in width, so I'll need to add in a row of something to increase the length - maybe a row of sawtooth stars that use up more 4 patches and bonus HSTs.  Sometimes the quilt top dictates how it wants to be finished and this one seems to want to be queen size.  Amazing how those little four patches I randomly pieced from 2" strips grew up to be something so big.