Keeping up appearances

Well here are my final choices for the quilting of the blocks and borders. 

I wanted to stay as close to the nautical theme as I could and so a compass rose gave me the most straight lines for this novice quilter. 

The quilting pattern on the right is once again mainly straight lines and star shapes, but quilting advice was to incorporate curves or circles into triangle and squarish blocks. So following that advice and still hoping to stay away from having to quilt curves, this block was chosen.The quilting pattern below is a sister to the one on the right, chosen for the reason of star shape, curves in a square and hopefully simplicity in quilting.

These stars will then fill in the block borders. I have one more block to include...this is the secondary top and bottom border. As you can see I will just reduce the size of the compass rose and use it here. I was trying to keep the variety of designs simple, but each block is so different that I felt the same quilting designs would not work.

I could not find templates for quilting and that is why I chose the above designs. I really didn't want to spend a lot of time cutting plastic templates and got the expert advice from Dales Fabric department in Amherst Nova Scotia. Thank you Doreen. She recommended this new product Transdoodle. It reminds me of the paper we used to us to transfer sewing darts on our dress patterns. At first I was reluctant to buy what may have been a no good gimmick. But Doreen opened the tube and we tried it out. It works beautifully and I can transfer each block as I proceed in my quilting. In theory all of this reads fairly well. But as I am finding out, time will tell.

The quilt is all basted together and it took me 5 hours. My darling dearest is down with a bad summer cold so I listened to In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan for the whole 5 hours. Very good company he was too!