I posted pictures of this before, but I have finally layered this quilt and started to hand quilt it tonight. My idea was to quilt lines 1/4" from the seams of all of the ivory shapes. Don't like the look of it.

Then I started to quilt close to the seams of all the ivory shapes. Still not in love.

Does any one have any ideas as to how I could go about quilting this?

I chose to hand quilt it because I wanted to highlight the different blocks and an all over meander fmq just wasn't elegant enough...

BTW, it now has a 6" border around the outside of the same fabric as the sashing.

Sorry I can't help with ideas; I always am stumped at this point, too. Just wanted to say that I think it is beautiful. I love the colors!

I love the colors too. I'm not a hand quilter and my usual fall back is to MQ 1/4 around all areas.

I have one that I'm going to hand quilt also. I'm taking each one and address it by it's self. I've been looking closely at the feathers and other elements that have been posted by LAQ and others and just create as I go. I am going to Google "hand quilting motifs" and start collecting ideas. The best thing to do is just jump in and learn as you go!:)

what if you used a brown to tan verigated - varigated? - thread and did snails or circles or something. Either that or just did close stippling in the light colors? This is always a puzzlement for me, but I'm getting brave in my old age and doing some overall quilting, like snails or hearts or something and I'm usually happy with it. It's very pretty

I recently had the same problem and found that different quilting in each block actually took away from the quilt. So I ripped it out and did a large meandering feather pattern and that turned out lovely.

I think samplers like to have some unique motifs quilted in the background spaces as well as the outline quilting. Here is a link to one that I handquilted. Each block is handquilted a 1/4" from the seams and has added quilting in big open white spaces.

http://www.quiltingboard.com/t-107423-1.htm

I can see a lovely feather spray filling up the white star in the upper left hand corner, some cross hatching filling up the squares in the block on the bottom row with the 4 white squares, some swirls of some sort in your snails trail block, etc. Try finding some books on handquilting in your library and see if that can't give you some ideas for motifs. You can audition the motifs my drawing them on tracing paper or on clear vinyl with those pens they use for white boards that wash off and placing over the block to give an idea of what your completed quilting may look like.