Doodles

 Now that the Chain Link quilt top is finished and pinned, it's ready to go under the needle of the Q-20.  Deciding how to quilt a finished quilt top is always a big decision for me, and I usually doodle little designs on paper.  This doesn't give a very good representation of how the quilt will look when the quilting is done though.  Today I tried something new.  I put a picture of the quilt in my Paint program and drew on it with different ideas:

This worked very well.  As I doodled around, I knew that "I don't care for that," or "That would be too time consuming and too much stopping and starting."  I actually like the arches, I had an "atom" shape in mind.  I have a new curved ruler to make it happen, and was excited to try it out, but when I put the needle and the curved ruler to the test, it was VERY hard to control the ruler and keep it steady.  I made two sewn arches and decided to abandon that idea as unworkable for me at this time.  I will need way more practice with that ruler before I attempt it on a quilt again!  I ended up spending a little time with Jack-the-SeamRipper to pick out those quilted arches.

But the doodles had another very good possibility in the batch, and I opened up a new copy of the picture in my Paint, and quilted the picture again.  Here is the result of that, and it is my final choice.  I will quilt the quilt like this:

I love how there are two visuals in the quilting: a starburst and a star.  This will be very easy to quilt (ruler work).  It is always a big relief to me to finally decide on how to do it!  Making that decision is harder than the actually sewing!!  

There is also a small gray border all around the quilt that is not shown in this picture, but I plan to echo the edges onto that border.  We'll see how it turns out, and I can decide what to do with the border at that point, but that's the plan for now!