I agree that you should not distract from your wonderful octagons. This is myidea of a perfect kid quilt, lively with lots to talk about. I think you might consider making it easy on yourself in the quilting. The center section could be done easily by treating each octagon into a square, that is, doing a simple gridwork in black, then doing the same with a grey for the border. I'd probably meander the written area. Whatever you decide to do, it will be a fine quilt for the purpose, and certain to be precious to your DGS. He will be lucky to have it.
Hmmm good idea about treating each octagon separately. In thinking about it, I would kind of like to leave the little black squares in the middle part and the little white areas in the border just stitched
around, so they look as if they are little squares on point, rather than 4 separate triangles sewn together (do you know what I mean?)
Any ideas for binding? I thought about doing a faux piping binding since it's so easy and effective, but I don't want it to end up too busy. I could do the words as a binding, since I've got lots of it, but it might take away from the border, and it might be too light a colour. I thought of a colourful stripe on the bias, with a red faux piping, but that might be too busy. I could do plain black - maybe with a touch of red as the faux piping. Any input?!