Advice needed !

Okay, here goes................the HodgePodge quilt MAY be finished. I finished machine-quilting it this morning, and spent this afternoon and evening binding it..........................

BUT................. I want to show you how I quilted the blocks and then, that's where I need the advice of someone who makes machine-quilted quilts.

Here's the block........(the color is off because it was photographed indoors under a bedside lamp.) As you can hopefully see, the block has two skinny sides and two fat sides, surrounding the inner 4 rectangles. I quilted across the skinny borders, and through the rectangles about 1 3/8 inches apart, but not in the fat borders. I did this intentionally, so that the quilt would not be totally quilted the same all over. Each block is rotated a half-turn, so when you look at the whole quilt, one block is quilted horizontally and the next is quilted vertically.

Now, the fat strips are 2 1/2 inches wide, and my worry is that this is too wide to leave unquilted. I thought that it would provide a different texture from the skinny quilting, but now I'm afraid that when the quilt gets its wonderful 'shrunken' look from the cotton batting (after laundering), the wider areas will look too 'poofy', and just look like I was too lazy to quilt more.

I need to know if 2 1/2 inches is too wide to leave unquilted in a quilt with cotton batting. Actually, it's 80%cotton/20%polyester, Cotton Classic. I'm not really worried about it moving around, just poofing up or looking funny, unquilted. Am I making sense?

The borders are quilted pretty narrowly too, as you can see here in this shot of one corner and one end.

I had a little bit of fun by inserting just 3 sections of a nice cable braid..........I just couldn't stand not to do a little something extra in that long unpieced expanse of fabric up the lefthand border.

At this point, I'm always anxious to get a new quilt thrown in the washer and dryer for that antiqued look, and yet, right now this one is so nice and flat....no waves or puckers anywhere.....I really like that too !