Deciding what to stitch

I have finished the quilt for my folks and am very pleased with how it turned out.
Before I share the finished 'masterpiece'. I wanted to chronicle how I came up with the final quilting design.

My idea

 I was really stumped on what to do for the center diamonds. So I went to the Machine Quilter's Resource forum and asked for design help. I got some really great feedback, especially from a really nice lady named Peggy. She provided the sketch below:

Peggy Holt's idea

I was blown away! Incredible. I loved her introduction of curves, it absolutely transformed the overall design.

So now my big dilemma was my ability to execute various elements. This is only the 3rd quilt I've ever quilted (on a long arm or otherwise).

In progress, stitchin in the ditch

I started out with all the stitching in the ditch and straight line quilting and then went through and did a meander around the kokopelli's. Annoyingly I found that I could stitch decently moving from left to right on the long arm but as soon as I tried to move from right to left the thread would start shredding.
Instead of investigating the issue I just plowed forward always making sure I was moving from left to right. Daisy will be getting a thorough spa cleaning before the next project is loaded and hopefully I can fix the problem of shredding thread.

Next post...the finished quilt (woot!).