Quilting ideas

The actual process of quilting my textile art pieces always gives me trouble.  I'm bored with the usual quilting motifs; most of them just don't work well with my ragged edge collage technique.  I must quilt these creations, the stitching holds the layers together and it is mandatory to enter them in shows, the stitching through layers of fabric is the total identity of "quilt."  The quilt stitching is also a vital design element in the whole piece.

I'm not proposing any solid answers here to my own dilemma; I guess I am just ranting today.  I have some ideas that I am soon to attempt.  Recently, I found these line drawings while doing research on something else:

This page is from the October, 1887 Criterion magazine, located at the Marietta College Library.  I believe that it was part of an order form for embroidery patterns, but I am wondering if I could use the idea of line drawing and turn that into quilting designs.  The concept probably still won't work with most of my collages, but I could easily come up with another overall design concept to feature the line drawing-quilting.  Maybe I'll just use much bigger collage pieces.  Creativity is all about rethinking what you have done and figuring out how to do what you want to do.