Firtsly I am sorry for putting this up a bit late. I was totally wrapped up with moving to a new house and unpacking.

Which;  the whole thing had caused me to lose my block 1, so I piece another one. LOL.

Anyway, I am done quilting it!

Here it is :

So, for your block, you can try and design how you would want to quilt it. I suggest you to try and do a feature in the plain background.

In mine, I had that squiggly seaweed that I want to pop out.

You can be free and do whatever you fancy. It can be a triangle forming a star feature for the whole block like the one I design in photo below (in blue); or you can add curves (eg the green one) which would definitely give a new look to your block. This is why we call it custom quilting.

Once you determine the main feature, determine what type of filler quilting design you would like to use.
If you really want to pop out some parts of the quilting design, make sure you use very dense filler design.

I love scribbling as it is very dense and very easy to do and to travel from one place to another.
Here is a great VIDEO TUTORIAL for scribbling by Cindy Needham. Practice the filler quilting on a piece of scrap sandwich (by sandwich, I mean a small scrap of top, batting and backing)

I first outline the outer 1/4inch seam and outline my feature. Then I start quilting the filler surrounding the parts where I want the design to pop out. (in this case I quilt densely around the seaweed)

Layer your block with the batting and backing. Spray baste if required. Then off to the machine!

First quilt following the outline you drew, then quilt the dense design surrounding the outline.

I continue to do the corners by adding some swirly. I travel to these corners by quilting in the ditch. Do not worry, it doesn’t have to be really perfect, mine is far out but I am happy with them.

Back of the block:

As you can see, I also tried to to pop the octopus out.. if you do not have any fussy cut, don’t worry – even better, you can outline a diamond or and kind of shape in the middle and do a dense quilting around it. It will create a great texture and pop the featured shape out!