wow, in toda'ys world there are millions of stencils both plastic and paper that you can get to help you hand and/or machine quilt...straight stitching or SID are so gone....
http://www.electricquilt.com and look up the Quiltmaker CD's that have over 500 patterns on them....amazing what you can with those...I use golden threads paper to track or print on and use those to guide my machine quilting!
By hand I use them to make pin dot tracings, or I use magic chalk duster and pounce on stencils!