Handkerchief quilt

Ever since I saw a quilt made of vintage handkies on the internet a year or so ago, I knew I had to try it.  After giving away most of my handkie collection last year, I kept enough to make a quilt or two, and decided this weekend was a good time to start.  I've been working on chicken stitcheries and patchwork for months, and it was time for a break. 
There are several variations of handkie quilts in books and on the internet, and I'm planning to make two.  The first one that I started last night is with the printed handkies.  I bought two metres of off-white cotton, cut it up into 14" squares, and used quilt spray to adhere the handkies to the squares.  Then I machine stitched around the border of each handkie to hold them permanently.  The reason I cut the background squares into 14" is because the largest handkie was 12.5 " square, so taking into account seam allowance  for joining the blocks, I cut them all the same size for the rest of the handkies.  Here they are spread out on the floor in the layout I have chosen (with help from my husband who has a good eye for these things, I am finding!).

Because they are all so light coloured, I think I will buy some slightly darker fabric to use for sashing and the border.  Ken suggested much darker fabric but I don't want to 'drown' the handkies in a very dark border.  What do you think?

The other handkie quilt I want to do will use the embroidered handkies I have.  They mostly have something embroidered in just one corner, and to use them like I have with the ones above, it would be just a big expanse of white handkies, so I found a pattern which has them folded diagonally, with the stitched corner showing, and attached to background fabric in a different way.