Your quilt is beautiful! Sorry you had a bad experience with Quilters Dream cotton. I love their products. I have a feeling you used their thinnest one, called Request. I used that and, while it is suppose to be great for hand quilting, I also felt it was too thin. Now I only use their Select which has a nice loft. I recently got their wool. Have not tried it yet but read rave reviews here about it. BTW, I think the shadowing on the back adds to the quilt.