Since this is a very geometric quilt, I debated doing some angular designs and square chains and such. But ... I wanted to practice my feathers, so I ended up putting a feather in every square ring. That gave me a lot of practice, especially with turning corners. (Plus I just love to quilt them.) I lined the sashing and borders with a swirly design that Lori Kennedy called the paper clip, which is really a tall and skinny swirl with no sharp points. I tied it together with the continuous curve I love so much at all the sashing intersections.
Feathers are some of my favorite things to quilt, and they're also the hardest to look just right. But the point is to have fun, and improve along the way, since there's no perfection in free-motion quilting anyway. I have to keep reminding myself when I encounter the moments of doubt that I have felt this way about every quilt I've done previously, but when I finished them, the mistakes really don't bother me anymore, if I even notice them. Well, with this quilt, there are some okay feathers ... and some pretty bad ones. I'm slowly trying to figure out what the magic formula for a feather is that takes it from ugly to dreamy.
There's also always a part of me that wonders whether I should have quilted it the other way (emphasize the square-ness with straight lines and geometric quilting designs), but if I had, I'd probably always wonder if I should have done it this way. There are just too many ways to quilt a quilt, but I can only choose one, and at the end, it's a finished quilt, so that's a win.