well, to each his own. She can do as she wishes with her quilts. I have hand quilted many antique tops. I wouldn't have even paid $5 for the one in her post!! Old fabrics are going to disintegrate whether you quilt them or not, if they are unstable to begin with.

Oh my, such a treasure. Beautiful.

Maybe on the quilt Barbara Brackman featured but not this one. I think it will be gorgeous when quilted. It's already gorgeous!

I had a very old, but beautiful quilt top with appliqué butterflies on it, the background fabric was very thin white cotton. I knew I wouldn’t hand quilt it so I asked my long arm lady if she could do it. I used a plain piece of fabric for the backing and it turned out beautiful. I am very careful with this vintage quilt.

I’m having the same dilemma. Years ago I hand quilted several small quilts but I prefer machine quilting. I can’t wrap my head around hand stitching around everyone of these hexagons. I’ll let you know.

I need to get better about taking pictures with my phone and/or get out my old flatbed scanner again, but I'll try and get an image of the design I have sketched out so far. My goal was to have every hex with some amount/not too much of stitching. I have three hearts connected in the center block (like a flower) that go out for 3 rows, then a twisty line with more hearts going into the hexes that were otherwise missed. I have the full hexes between flowers, not the diamonds you have, those paths I will simply circle the flower right at the points of the hexes, so those will get two rows of stitching each. They seem tiny to me (usually I use puffier poly bats) but will quilt just fine with warm and natural. I found this website, if you give them the standard side measurement it will print a grind of hexes for you! Made it much easier for me to figure something out.
https://incompetech.com/graphpaper/hexagonal/

I was able to scan in the rough draft of my quilting design. You will notice lots of erasures and such :) I won't be doing the row stitching shown (did those in ink), just the heart design. Hoping I did this correctly!

The scan worked, thanks so much!