Is there a better way to do borders in Inkscape?

[bartmoss]

Hi Guys,

I am just playing around, basically avoiding doing climate design for Thraeton. Anyway I came up with the obvious way to do nice colorful borders in Inkscape, the type you'll find in many old-style atlasses:

1) Cut up the continent into different countries
2) Duplicate a country
3) Use the dynamic offset tool to make the upper of the two shapes a little smaller (the inset tool doesn't seem to like overly complex shapes)
4) set style of the smaller shape to no stroke, solid white fill, small amount of blur
5) Set the style of the bigger shape to any solid color you like
6) Done

In my opinion it looks fairly good:



I wonder, though, is there a better way to do it? It would be much easier to edit the map later if I could assign such a faded look to a line directly, but I can't figure out how to do that if it's even possible at all...