Cross pollinating with Quilting

I've had a break through.

I've been attracted to the idea of telling a story with this wall hanging. In knitting, I think the traditional "story telling" technique is Fair Isle. So, I've been playing with that idea. But then my professor sent me this story about a Kansas City modern quilter. Quilts are often made to tell a story as well.

So I've been playing with the idea of combining quilting and knitting. I've never quilted before (but have ALWAYS wanted to learn) so I'm a little anxious about entering into a domain I'm unfamiliar with. But not nervous enough to not do it :)

Here are a few of my ideas:

I could knit pieces to make the "fabric" and then quilt it together. Kind of like this:

But that looks all scraggly to me and I like the idea of clean crisp lines of quilting. Like this:

Another idea I had was to design the entire thing as one and then knit it as one huge piece. Perhaps similar to this:

One thing that I love about quilting is that you have the color work and the patch work that add design, but you also can add design with the stitching, like here:

Which might be (relatively) easy to accomplish with the right placement of knits and purls.

I'm not sure what I'll end up doing. Maybe a combination of these things?
And how to add in a story? And what story to tell? So many things to think about!