Arghh! I just wrote a post thanking everyone for their comments, then somehow I lost it, so here I go again.
Thank you all for takiing the time to post. I don't know what I was thinking when I labeled this a disaster. I think I went off the rails a little because I'm making this as a favor to a friend...anyway, I agree with everything that's been written here. My husband pointed out that all of my regular cotton quilts have the same look as this one (mostly I've used batiks, and they don't puff). Because the borders in this case are plain white, the crinkly effect is really obvious. I don't know of anything I could do at this point to remedy that. If anyone can think of any cool thing I could do (on the machine) with the borders, please chime in! The batting was 100% cotton Warm and Natural from the LQS.
Funny thing is, on some level I knew it needed some type of quilting on the borders, but I have so little actual quilting experience (always sent to the longarmer until now) that I was afraid I would really mess it up, so I skipped it.
I really need to get out of the habit of being my own worst critic. I now think it's a cute quilt and, perhaps best of all, it's DONE!