How do I quilt this?
 

Hi everyone, I am new to the forum but not new to quilting, I have enjoyed reading all of your posts, and the tips are great. I have a problem, I cannot come up with a quilting pattern for this quilt. Any suggestions? not so great with FMQ but I can sew a killer straight line, lol. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,

I'm not a FM quilter so I don't have any suggestions for quilting this quilt, just wanted to say it's a beauty. Good luck, I'm sure you will get some good suggestions from more experienced quilters.

Your quilt is beautiful! Do you want some FMQ practice? You could SITD around all colors and then FMQ the background.

I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't 'practice' fmq on a top you like. I would go with straight diagonal lines. You can connect the lines from the center of the paisley square that was created when the blocks were joined to the notch in the cross. Do this in both directions. Then it looks like if you sew a straight line on the side of this square, the line would extend to hit the notch again. See if there are other diagonal lines you can do based on the blocks. Great top, love the colors!

Following from paperPrincess you could cross hatch through the diagonals of each square. Easy straight lines.

How about echo stitching around each block?

This is a very lovely quilt. Well done. IMHO the type of quilting depends on how you want the finished quilt to look. If you want the quilt to be more gemetric then I would do SID and Diaginal lines thru-out the entire quilt maybe from corner to corner and at intervals across the diaginal of the quilt. (use blue painter tape for this). If you want a softer appearance then I still would do SID around outside of blocks and maybe diaginal inside blocks and then do gentel meandering on the off white part. I would not follow the seam lines since this might break up the over all look of the quilt. How much quilting depends on how you want the finished quilt to look and also what the manufacturer of the batting recommends as the "distance part to quilt". This info should be on the batting packaging. If you center block is larger then the recommendation this you need to stitch inside the block. It is important to follow this recommendation so batting does not come apart with use and washing.

I'm new to FMQ patterns, but I've seen Baptist Fans used really nicely on patterns with squares & blocks.

Tartan's reference: http://blog.petitdesignco.com/2012/1...-quilting.html

Thanks everyone for the great ideas, I will post it when finished. Thanks again.