Starting my first custom quilting project

So today I started quilting the Eyes on the Stars quilt. This will be entered in the Vermont Quilt Festival so I am doing my very, very best to have an interesting and complicated design. 
We have had the Gammill for a couple of months. The learning curve has been very steep. The idea is to program the designs and have the computer do the stitching - good in theory but not so easy in practice. But, its getting better.
So Eyes on the Stars uses the Talking Points block plus 880 half square triangles. There are 11 fabrics. The HSTs are used for a 4" sashing between the 'eye' blocks plus an 8" border around the outside. 

First I needed to give everything a final press - both the top and the wide backing. Then I loaded the quilt top by pinning to the leader on the top roller and rolling it up. It is 100 x 80, I am doing it across the 100 dimension. 

The wide backing is great because look Mom, no seams! Just had to trim off the selvage as it doesn't stretch the way the fabric does. I am using a double layer of batting to really pop the quilt design. The bottom is a Hobbs 80/20 cotton/polyester and the top layer is Hobbs 100% wool.  I tuck this under the machine table rather than using the roller that is there - way to0 hard to crawl under, layer the two battings and rolling it up. 

With the quilt top in position I am ready to start. I made sure there was room for a strip of fabric on the side. This is to test my tension each time I do a thread change. First I plan on doing in-the-ditch around all the shapes using a dusty colored mono filament thread for both the top and bottom. By shapes I mean the stars, the eyes and the spikes around the eyes. This will really disguise where the blocks are.

With stitching around the outside of the star you can see how puffy the inside is. Then the quilting in the stars is with a Glide silver thread. Can't see the sparkles on the pic but trust me - it sparkles.
So that is how far the project got - one width of in-the-ditch and a sample star. I plan to do a lot of thread changes so each shape has its own color. Can't get back to it until Monday.... but keep watching.