Mariners Compass.....the Quilting

I somehow found the courage to load this quilt and begin quilting it but boy have I had issues.  I just cannot get the bobbin tension right on Ava.  I had a scrap sandwich next to my actual quilt and kept adjusting the tension and testing my stitches on there......and I was happy with them, however, when I moved to my actual quilt, everything just kept going wrong.   This made me very tense and uptight and I had to keep reminding myself to RELAX. 

 I started out with the darker variegated thread but it did not look right so i swapped it for a variegated thread leaning more towards teal. I also changed the quilting plan a little bit.  So the quilting is done but I am not happy with the tension on the back....I will have to work on that some more.

In yesterday's post I outlined my quilting plan. Here's how the quilting actually turned out.

My design for the border stayed essentially the same but instead of doing the swirl in each rectangle, I stretched it out to cover two rectangles at a time.

For the blades, I kept to the swirl on the smaller blades and made a bit of variation for the medium blades and, HOORAH, I kept them going in the right direction all the way around. I stuck with the same design (as planned) in the spaces between the blades.

I tried out a "fern leaf" on the four large central blades and even though they look a bit messy here in this photo, I don't think they look too bad as a whole.

Now, I did have something completely different in mind for these corner bits but at the last minute, I had a look at the planned design and decided I would go with something a bit more freestyle and I am not sorry that I did that.

Tomorrow I will get the binding finished and then I can show you the final result.