I love the Carpenter's Star quilt - My girls and I made one for my husband's birthday. He loves everything about it! He loves the clean lines, the fact that it is called a "Carpenter"s star (he is a carpenter) and that it was made with love by all four of his girls!
In my humble (longarm quilter) opinion, I think once it is quilted up, the texture of the quilting will really bring it to life, and you will love it again. I'll attach a picture, and you can see what I mean. This was quilted with a layer of cotton and a layer of wool batting to make the quilting stand out.
I like the idea of removing the outer border and replacing with a plain or tone on tone color drawn from one of the more prominent colors in your quilt already such as the browns. It would really frame it and tie it all in together - as long as it was in the "darks" family, not a medium tone. You may not need a huge 10" wide border - mine has a 1-1/2" stop border with a 6" outer border. And by the way, nice work!