What in the Heck are Sashing, Borders, and Cornerstones???

Hello my dear friends, and welcome back to my little corner of the internet! I’m so happy you’ve decided to join me! If you’re quilt curious and digging around in quilting blogs or on IG QuiltLand, you may have heard the terms Sashing, Borders, and Cornerstones a time or two. But what in the world are they??? In a nutshell, they’re all pieces of fabric inserted either between blocks in a quilt or around the outside of the quilt.

Borders

Borders in a quilt are just like borders in a country. They’re what can go around the outside of a quilt. There are a number of reasons and ways you might use borders in a quilt. I’ve used borders when I wanted my quilt to be larger than the blocks allowed it to be. For example, I was making a Queen bed sized quilt out of a layer cake and jelly roll combo, but when I’d put all of the blocks together, the quilt just didn’t have enough width or length! I’m a huge fan of quilts that have quite a bit of drop down the sides of the bed, and my top just wasn’t as big as I wanted once I’d pieced it. Simple fix: I found a nice coordinating fabric and made WIDE borders on the sides and bottom, and a slightly narrower border along the top. Now that quilt hangs beautifully on a queen-sized bed, and my sweet mother-in-law loves using it when she comes to visit.

Borders can also be used as a design element. Like using a mat in a picture frame to really bring out the design of the quilt top, a good coordinating border can really pull everything together once a top is complete. Sometimes a quilt will have a narrow border inside of a wider border. Think of how sometimes you see double mats in a picture frame. The narrower inner border acts as a sort of outline of the quilt top and really emphasizes the artistry of the piecing.

Lastly, borders can serve a functional role in the quilt. If your blocks are pieced and fairly complicated, you can end up with a lot of seam allowances coming out to the edges of the quilt. This can make squaring up, quilting, and binding a little more difficult. If you instead put a nice border with minimal seams around the edge, then you can help make sure your quilt is nice and square and flat, and it’ll be much nicer binding the quilt at the end of the day. Here’s are a couple of quick little examples of quilts. One with a single large border, and the other has a small inner border.

Sashing

If a border is like the border of a country, think of sashing as being similar to state lines. Sashings are (usually) narrower strips of fabric inserted between blocks in a quilt. As with borders, they can serve the purpose of increasing the size of a quilt, or they can serve a design or functional purpose within the quilt. For size increase, you may feel like your blocks alone are not large enough, but you don’t want to add on a huge border. Sashing is another method to increase size that adds a different feel to a quilt. For example, if you have a quilt that has 12-inch blocks and is 4 blocks wide, maybe you’d like to have a finished quilt that is larger than 48 inches wide. If you’d like it instead to be 60 inches wide, you need to add 12 inches to the width. But if you don’t want 6-inch-wide borders, you could instead add 2.5-inch sashings between the blocks, and a 2.5-inch border around the outside, and you’d have a quilt that comes out to 60.5 inches wide, without that gigantic border.

As a design aesthetic, sashing serves as a delineation between blocks. So your blocks don’t all kind of blend into each other. The sashing is like an outline around each block, and so each block stands out as it’s own little work of art.

Functionally, sashing can make joining your blocks together much easier and more pleasant, particularly if your block has a lot of seams. If you were to join two blocks with a lot of seams together, you’d probably get some seam allowances that would get turned under a little bit when sewing the seam together. With sashing, you have one flat piece of fabric joining to the extra-seam-y block, so you can really concentrate on getting all those seam allowances on the block nice and flat.

Here are a couple of examples of what sashing would look like on a quilt, first by itself, and then with a border, then with a narrow inner and wider outer border. Can you see how the overall quilt design gets more interesting as you add sashing and borders?

Cornerstones

Okay, so what is a Cornerstone? Simply put, a cornerstone is a small square of fabric that is placed at the corner where sashings and/or borders meet. Cornerstones are not necessary. Sashing and borders can be added without adding in cornerstones. So cornerstones are purely a design element that can add a little extra fun to a quilt design. Below are some examples of cornerstones used with sashing and with borders. The first example shows dark teal sashing, white cornerstones at the sashing intersections, and lime green borders. The second example adds in white cornerstones on the borders. The third example is a bit of a cheat, because instead of a solid border, the sashing and cornerstones are continued around the outside of the quilt.

These mockups are all fairly plain, so that I could demonstrate the ideas. But they get ever so much more interesting when you add in prints! Here are a couple more mockups of the last one I just showed you, but with prints from Joy by Edyta Sitar on the left, and Sunprint 2024 by Alison Glass on the right.

You can see how adding in prints from a fabric collection makes both examples so much more interesting. Additionally, though the basic structure of both quilts is the same, the differences in design aesthetic between the two lines, and even the two designers, makes the two quilts look so wildly different!

If you’d like to explore quilt patterns that make good use of sashing and cornerstones, Meghan from Then Came June does an amazing job highlighting her block designs with sashing in various styles. I’m not an affiliate – I get no compensation for saying this – just a huge fan of her work! Find her quilt patterns at www.thencamejune.com.

I hope y’all have enjoyed this trip down the rabbit hole of Borders, Sashing, and Cornerstones. I might have something coming up for you very soon that incorporates these design details!

Did I forget something? Still have questions? Know another designer who makes excellent use of these elements? Feel free to drop a comment and let me know! TTFN!