Quilting progess on baby blankets

So the two baby blankets I'm working on are both well into the process of quilting. For Maren's quilt, I started by doing (faux) stitch-in-the-ditch to outline all the pieced-looking segments. This was probably the easiest quilting I've ever done! The lines were of course very easy to follow, and since it was a cheater print there were no thick seam allowances on the underside to navigate. I've finished all of that, and am still contemplating exactly what I'll do to fill in the spaces on either side of the column of flags.


For Cord's quilt, I couldn't decide right away what to do. I didn't want to sew over the puppies, and I wanted to do something in the blue segments to suggest splashing/rippling water, without being too time-consuming. I thought about doing stipple quilting, but that definitely failed the "time-consuming" test, as well as being denser than I wanted. I finally settled on doing wavy lines. I focused on just keeping them ad-hoc, and not stressing over getting them perfectly parallel or concentric. That was kind of hard for me! I had to keep stopping myself from picking out segments and redoing them just a few millimeters away. I kept reminding myself that even if I see all kinds of minute imperfections, the likelihood of other people noticing (if I don't point them out) is practically nil. And there's the old crafter's saw, "finished is better than perfect." I do want to give it as a gift as soon as I can!

All the quilting I have left on this one is the outline of the pool and the pool deck.