Vintage Quilt Revival Sampler (Finished)

I feel like I'm working in hyperactive mode on quilts at the moment - I'm enjoying the process as much as always, but I have several deadlines I'm working to so I've been flitting between three different projects for the last month or so. One of these is the class sample I've been working on for a BOM-style class I'll be teaching at Frangipani Fabrics starting in August, based on some the blocks in the book Vintage Quilt Revival. I've been quilting this quilt over the last week or two and finished it up the binding this morning. I have to admit I'm not entirely happy with how the quilting turned out - it's not horrible, but I did learn a lot through the process of quilting this quilt and would approach it a bit differently next time.

As I said in my post last week, I was really excited about having so much negative space to play with, and had a general idea as to how I wanted to approach it. I knew I wanted to have a few large feathers winding their way through the negative space, so they appear to sit behind the strip of blocks in some places. I didn't really have any other plan aside from that - and I think that was my downfall. I think with this much space to play with it would be better to have a better-than-vague plan. The biggest thing I think I could improve is the placement of the feathers.

Don't get me wrong, I think my quilting looks pretty good on this quilt, I'm just not all that happy with the placement of the feathers and I'm not sure if they work as a design element or not. I think this is the key thing I learnt when I was working on this quilt - that is, how difficult it is to plan out quilting on a large area of negative space on a domestic machine. This may be an issue for long-armers as well, but I found it really difficult to visualise how my quilting was going to look on a larger scale, especially the large feathers. I didn't do any sketching before I started quilting, but I think it would have helped enormously if I had :o)

I think the saving grace with this quilt is that the quilting blends so well into the background (I used Aurifil 50wt in Dove grey for all the quilting), so even though I didn't make the best choices for the quilting, it isn't glaringly obvious ;o)

Regardless of my reservations on the quilting side of this quilt, I really love it. I love the colours (especially as we descend into grey and cold days) and I really like the layout. I'd love to hear your thoughts though - do you think the feathers work? Do you ever come to the end of a project and have things you would do differently next time? I often do, but not as strongly as this time around!
xx Jess