Originally Posted by mammaof5
Would love to do by hand but i would like to be able to use it this year so I will be doing this by machine :)
OK, here is what I recommend. I would mix hand and machine quilting on this. I have done it plenty of times and it looks fine.
FMQ on a machine is not easy to master and for this beautiful top I would not attempt to machine quilt your cut heart stencil mark as a total newby, heck I wouldn't do it as an oldy on my domestic machine, on my LA yes, but I never could master FMQ on a domestic machine. But fear not, the TIC design always looks good with straight machine stitching. I would stitch straight lines diagonally through each of your squares forming the chain on the body of the quilt so you would end up with 3 parallell lines of straight stitching going through the 9P blocks that form your chain, on the diagonal. You can do this with a walking foot and it is nice and easy to do so little to no learning curve. SID or just next to the ditch on either side in your lovely seminole piecing to make it pop and SID (or again, just next to the ditch, which is much easier than trying to get in the ditch) on you corner 9P squares. Once that is all done, I would hand quilt your heart stencil in all the white boxes. After that if I thought it still needed more I would do a nice flowing vine and leaf in the dark green inner and outer border that separates the main body of the quilt from the seminole piecing to kind of bring out the floral fabric you used.