Pale Blue

It's funny. When my son was in grade school, he learned Phonics. I didn't learn to read that way. He said something once, about a word that had a silent "e" at the end of it. "The E tells the A to say its name." (The word "name" is a good example of this, although I am sure many of my readers will be happy to correct me if I am wrong.) It connects to something I have long believed about the binding of a quilt.

"The binding tells the quilt what color it is."

When I wrote yesterday's post I was pretty sure I would use the light blue binding on the Sparkling Winkel quilt, above. After all, it has the greatest number of diamond shapes. I don't like any of the cream or white variations. I thought the yellow was too bright, the orange too brash and the dark blue too dark. I thought there wasn't enough red in the quilt to make the binding red.

But during the day yesterday I had my doubts, and started leaning toward the RED.

I do want the quilt to have an outer edge, to stop the design from falling off the quilt, so the light colors are out. And I don't want more busy there, so the busy cream colored fabric with the bright colored squares is also out. I wondered about the red, and thought it would be a good choice.

Now here's the thing. There are no wrong answers. I think either of the blues and the red would be good choices. But looking at the WHOLE quilt, as in the photo above, it's clear to me that the dark blue and red would be too dark and hold the energy too tightly IN. The light blue wouldn't do that. It's just dark enough to stop the design, but it almost isn't a FULL STOP. I think it would hold the design in, but tenderly.

The Sparkling Winkel isn't a RED quilt, and it isn't a DARK BLUE one. It isn't YELLOW and it isn't ORANGE either.

A LIGHT BLUE binding tells us what we already know. That the quilt has more LIGHT BLUE than any other color.

And that works for me.