Thank you all for your helpful words of wisdom and encouragement! I'm going to keep doing it by hand. I found that I was initially getting 15- 18 stitches per inch but I actually like them a bit larger more like 6-8 or so and it's easier to keep uniformity that way. Since this is a queen size quilt I imagine my outer blocks will be quilted much more to my desire than my inside blocks where I have started. Will be interesting to compare the two since by the time I finish I will have done an awful lot of quilting!