Congratulations! It's beautiful! I hand-stitched my first and only quilt so far, so that's my only experience. I loved it! It was really relaxing and pleasurable once I got the hang of it.
On how to quilt the borders... One thing I did that I won't do next time was that I quilted diagonal lines that went out toward the edges of the quilt. The problem with that was that when I squared up the quilt, I cut off a few of the knots in the thread, so that quilting started coming out immediately. So next time (which should start any day now), I'm going to quilt fully-contained shapes within the border, staying away from the edge.