Originally Posted by Iceblossom

I really meant echoing the squares with a zig-zag, but we can also use fancy stitches. By the way, typically in quilting like this you do as long a movement as you can, so for a single chain of squares you would go the diagonal of two squares, leave the needle down, pivot to the next direction, doing half the lines in one pass. Then you complete the lines in a second pass. You don't typically want to make two zig zags to make the squares, or out line each square individually.

My modern machine does the serpentine stitch and it is a wonderful solution for making a grid a bit fancier and will be my go-to solution for any standard gridded quilt. I just used it for the first time last year, but one of my Tuesday quilting ladies uses it on almost all her donation quilts and it looks good on all of them so far!

You can achieve the serpentine look manually, but in the picky part of my brain, I'd still have to draw it out and actually follow lines and not be able to do it free hand.

This was my project, the batting was a little thicker than I wanted and the fabric came in a bag from the thrift store so I didn't quite have the yardage I wanted... and I should have relaxed the wavy stitch a bit more to echo the fabric but had started in the middle of the quilt and decided to keep it as it is...