I love your quilts and quilting. I firmly believe quilting makes it a quilt. I hand quilted until I developed Cervical Stenosis, with thumb and two fingers numb on my right hand there is no way to continue. So, I switched to a longarm. Wow! What a mind blaster. Ladies, this is not easy and if you don't like math, don't bother machine quilting on a long arm. You may look at it and think it is the easy way out and it IS NOT. I like freehand, and even guiding the machine takes a lot out of you. You are on your feet for hours on one quilt. You rack it one way and then to do the sides like the top and bottom you have to rack it the other way, sometimes twice. It is so much easier to hand quilt but, alas, we can't all do it. I really appreciate the machine quilting with each block different and so many elements involved. I now know what it takes to do that. I am the first to admit machine is harder. As far as hard quilts, that depends entirely on the batting. I did twin bed quilts for my DGS's. One was W&W and the other Hobbs polydown. Both grandsons love the Hobbs and fight over it so I am making a third one to solve the problem. The quilts are identical except for the batting. It has been washed many times and still it is not cuddly. The problem is not how heavy the quilting but what is in the sandwich.