Orphan No More

Several years ago, in our quilting "bee" meetings, a part of the program involved different members presenting a block of the month. When it came my turn, I pulled one of my favorites from Marcia Hohn's site:  the Next Door Neighbor block.  It's a simple block, but put several of them together and a nice secondary pattern emerges. I simplified it even more to show off the star.

We had talked of doing some red/white/blue blocks and combining them for a couple of community quilts, so that's how I made mine, but there was no follow-through, so the block came back home with me and got lost in a bin.  I pulled it out when I came across Jack's chessboard and have been pondering whether to send it to Finn for her Orphan Train, or to try and do something with it, as I don't have more than a scrap of any of those fabrics now.

Finally I took the easy way out: just kept adding borders to it until the large 12" star wasn't so overwhelming.  And here is the result:

Now it measures 29 1/4 inches square and will make a nice little table topper--if I can get it quilted by Sunday. Otherwise it might just sit in the UFO zone until next summer. Two things are holding me up here; one is the quilting, the other is the final border.

The red is so prominent , I tried to tone it down with the final blue fireworks border, but seeing it in a photograph makes me think it needs a final red border--if only a narrow one--as the blues seem to recede. What do you all think?

And I have a question for all you domestic machine quilters out there. Somewhere along the way I either read or heard it recommended that you pull the last upper thread of your quilting through to the back and then tie it off.  I tried that, and ended up with all these little "rabbit ears" at the ends of lines everywhere.  I didn't like the look of that, and sometimes it made the end of the quilt line a little short of its connecting point. 

Then I did a no-no: I back stitched a couple of stitches at the beginnings and ends of lines of quilting. It looked better from the back, but I've heard we aren't supposed to do that.  Now, I know long-armers go for the continuous line of quilting, but sometimes I do parallel rows, so how do you stop and start all those times and make it look neat? Hand-quilting it would solve the problem, but that's not always an option.  Anyone out there have the same problem?  Or am I missing something?