One thing to keep in mind when hand quilting is that the batting can make it very easy or very difficult. Your batting choice will be *extremely* important. Hobbs wool batting is probably the best choice, Hobbs 80/20 would be my second choice. Cotton puts more drag on the needle. If you decide on cotton, stay away from cotton batting with scrim such as Warm and Natural, as the scrim adds a lot of drag. Wool is easiest to hand quilt, as is a thin polyester batting.
With hand quilting you do not want to stitch in the ditch. You can stitch 1/4" away from seams, and you can also quilt designs. However, it is much harder to hand quilt through seams, so you would want to keep any designs inside a quilt block.