Grasshopper Quilt-Block-To-Block Quilting

So much quilting space, what should I do? Do you have this problem too? With all the input we can get our hands on these days, courtesy of the Internet, plus our personal libraries of quilt books and magazines, it's pretty difficult to decide what's the right or best way to quilt any quilt. Many of us struggle with that decision with just about every quilt and I'm in that boat too. Sometimes there are so many different things to try, I don't know which way to go!
I knew I definitely wanted to do a very detailed quilting job on this quilt for sure. But from there, my biggest decision was whether to quilt an overall flowing design that would basically ignore all the blocks and become a secondary element, or to quilt something self-contained in each block. Of course I spent plenty of time on the internet looking at Pinterest and a number of quilter blogs for any and all inspiration and spent many evenings sketching out different designs to see if they might work. Because this quilt has plain batik fabrics, either a block-to-block or an overall design would work, but in the end, most of my sketches seemed to favor block-to-block using a variety of pebbles, cross hatching, McTavishing, swirls, curls, and on and on, so I went with it and started quilting all the blocks separately.

This quilt has 4 different blocks, two with large center squares and two with small center squares. To simplify the process, and get the quilting going (I still had a deadline looming) I chose different motifs for each of those blocks, and except for some small variations, I stuck with those motifs throughout the quilt.

Then I needed a design for the sashing and the two outer borders as well. All of those needed enough quilting to balance with the tight quilting I was planning for the blocks. After measuring and sketching, I came up with an interesting detailed design that really filled the brown outer border. And decided to use a special ruler on the inner border that would hopefully not be too time-consuming. For the sashing, I decided to do some vertical/horizontal piano keys and pebbling in the corner where 4 blocks would meet.

Here are some early shots of the border quilting in progress:

These show the arch quilting motif I did on the brown border.

A happy accident-I didn't realize the thread I chose had such a high contrast with the brown border fabric, it really gives the border a lacey appearance-love this! 

Will post again shortly-deadlines are here!

Dora