Ripping out and re-doing my binding.
I was just sure I had the right binding fabric for a baby/child quilt I'm doing. The quilt is a white background with a semi-scrappy nine patch using happy tonal prints and a Seuss print. The overall value is medium, leaning pastel. For my binding I chose one of the fabrics I used in the quilt, a happy teal and fuschia dot. I chose it because it matched and I had lots of it!. I machine sewed it on, and started hand-sewing to the back.
Screech! Ugh. It's too dark. The whole quilt goes from medium light to almost jewel tone, but not in a good way.
I am ripping the binding out and starting over again. I should probably use scraps this time, but I'm frankly too lazy! So I'm going with a lighter blue and pink print.
It's amazing what a binding can do to the character of a quilt. You can darken or lighten the whole "feel" of a quilt with just the edge color! From now on I'm going to make my choice based on the character I want to bring out. It won't be a haphazard choice in any way, because I'd just as soon not have to rip it out again!
I always learn more from failure than success, so this is good, right? ;-).
How do you go about choosing binding? Any formulas you've developed from trial and error?