I’m pretty monogamous with my quilting, not so much with my knitting. I’ve been known to have up to three projects on the needles at the same time. (I can hear the laughter – some of my friends have 7 or 8 projects going). With my quilting, I try and work on one quilt at a time. Suddenly things got out of hand, what with challenges from both my guilds as well as an impluse sew – I find myself with three unquilted tops. Time to get quilting!
The New York beauty took a long time to piece, I really needed to think long and hard about how to quilt it – to enhance the beauty. First stage was pretty easy, to highlight the crowns, simply stitch in the ditch. You can see the difference between the left – quilted and the right – still unquilted. I am using a medium grey thread so it sort of blends with everything but the dark background. 
Here is a larger image of the quilt before I started stitching. The crowns all look lovely and I didn’t want to hide any of the fabrics under a quilting pattern.
Here is a large section already quilted. You can see how the crowns are more stable and they pop more. Yay for quilting in the ditch. I am also grateful to my Craftsy class Beyond Basic Quilting. A very in depth class on free-motion quilting. Not modern quilting, although somewhat free form. The most important lesson I learned, I can jump all over the quilt, this isn’t a long arm and since I did a good job of glue basting, I’m not getting puckers on the back. I therefore quilted all the crowns first and then thought about what kind of filler to use on the background.
Close up, hopefully all this quilting will also stabilize the blocks and make them stronger.
In thinking about the background I remember a technique called McTavishing, named for Karen McTavish – a master quilter. You Tube is amazing, all it took was watching a few videos. I also watched Amy do her magic. She is a wonderful online teacher, has a very good class on Craftsy as well. 
Working with a very dark grey thread that matches the fabric I got to work.
The busy quilting on the solid fabric makes the crowns pop all the more. I am very pleased! Also, my quilting is improving, I’m simply getting better at it – practice is the reason why.
Although I’m not ready to bind, I have already made my binding from the many fabrics that are in the quilt. I’m hoping to get to that point sooner rather than latter!