The quilting, Signature quilt continues

For the body of the quilt, I decided on a repeating diagonal - something I can do easily and neatly with the walking foot.  In order to maintain the line across the white border, I lined up a ruler and chalked my destination onto the teal border.

The last bit of quilting involved about 8 inches on each end of the border. I really wanted to create a wave, and knew I would end up doing a bit of free motion quilting as a result.

I decided my best chance of keeping the pattern somewhat uniform was to use the tearaway paper method.  I first traced a wave pattern onto a piece of notebook paper, then stacked 8 pieces of golden threads quilting paper and pinned them all together. I unthreaded my machine and "sewed" along my tracing, or close to my tracing to punch holes in the quilting paper.  This is my first attempt at following a line, and as I warmed up, there was huge improvement.  I then pinned waves to each corner, flipping half of the waves over to work from the backside so that the would travel in the opposite direction. While doodling, I have learned that I can draw great waves to the right and really hideous ones to the left.  I started sewing the waves, still using invisible thread, from the point closest to the dolphins on one side, once I reached the corner, I then echoed the lower side of the waves and the low side of the dolphins until reaching the other corner where I picked up the waves and then finished with an echo back up.  Once I completed all four sides, I enjoyed tearing out the paper.  I also learned that the paper might not be the best solution for designs that are stitched closely together as it can be hard to get out of the really tight seams (and then learned too that it does not really wash away if you leave any on there).  For the corners, I used a chalk pen to freehand a stylized heart in order to connect the waves.

I trimmed the quilt to finished size and squared the corners utilizing the white border as a guide.

For batting, I used Natural Cotton batting by Pellon Legacy, with no scrim. It allows for a wonderful drape, but also needs to be quilted about 4 inches apart, and as I learned, produces a lot of lint while sewing.