Quilting the Black and White Challenge Piece

I am quilting  my challenge piece and working at it on and off as my eyes will allow. Yesterday I needed to rest my eyes so I cleaned my kitchen. I  needed to do something that was not visually demanding and now my kitchen is nice and clean and sparkly.
 I find that it is easy to get lost in the middle of the quilt sometimes so I used EQ to color my quilt design in lighter shades. That would allowed me to print it and sketch my quilting design over it with a black pen. I am quilting straight lines about 1/2 inch apart on the diamonds. This is is turning out to be tedious as I have to keep stopping and starting as I skip over the star points and the intersections where the diamonds cross other diamonds and the quilting lines will be in a different direction. There are a few places near the center that I sketched my quilting lines in the wrong direction and they look like a criss cross grid; that is not what I intend to do.

I've been using black thread but I am considering red for the red diamonds and I  have a black and light gray twist thread that I am thinking about for the star points. Quilting this is really a challenge for me. Not only is it hard to sew black on black but I also not really great at sewing straight lines.

So why am I doing this?

I guess because the quilt is telling me what it wants.

I always listen to my quilts;

 sometimes I am lazy and

do it my way but not today.