Congratulations on getting into quilting!
I think you will need to take out the hand quilting and basting and take all the layers apart before proceeding.
In terms of the hand quilting stitches, whoever did it did not know how to bury starting and ending knots in the batting. From your description and the photos, it looks like only the middle got hand quilted anyhow.l
(Photos down to one, so I will work from memory now.)
It looked to me as if a sheet had been used as the backing. Sheets can be very hard to hand quilt through, so I would want to change that. It may be part of the reason why the original quilter gave up on it.
The edges are not finished. The backing may have been brought to the front simply to protect the batting until the quilting was finished. I can't tell what the batting is. You may want to change that also to one that it easy to hand quilt.
The layers need to be basted a lot more than that before you start hand quilting. The usual recommendation is for thread basting lines to be no more than 4" apart in any direction.
Last edited by Prism99; 02-10-2013 at 02:47 PM.