Fitting in feathers

Yesterday I mentioned my method of fitting in the last few feathers in my feathered wreath, given they're all quilted free-hand. So here's a bit of a photographic tutorial:

Here the inner circle is quilted, and I'm about to start the feathers. You can just see the outer circle, but the marks are fading.

Now I've quilted the first few feathers. Note that they're not marked in any way. They're not going to be identical, but the overall effect is one of consistency.

Now I'm approaching the start of the feathers again; there's space for about 5 more plumes, so it's time to stop and get out the marker.

I roughly mark the size of the tips of the feathers, starting from the beginning and working back  towards the feather I've just quilted. These marks are for size only, and I have no intention of actually quilting along them.

You can see here that I've got back up the the last quilted feather, and conveniently for the purposes of this tutorial, there's only room for about half a plume left.

To 'fix' this, my plan is to adjust the size of my plumes a little smaller so they slowly get closer to matching the positioning of the marks. The difference in size won't be noticeable once the wreath is finished.

My first plume is goes almost halfway across the marking.

The second plume is a similar size,but only goes perhaps a third into the next marking.

By the time I get back to the first feather, they almost match the markings (which I remarked for this photo so they're more visible).

Unfortunately this doesn't show my neatest feather shapes, but you can kind of see that I've ended up with the feathers all of a similar size, instead of finishing with one huge or tiny plume which looks out of place. Viewed as a whole, the feathered wreath looks consistent.