Adding hand stitches to machine quilting

I just love where machine quilting is headed these days -- the effects that are achieved are truly amazing. Sometimes, though..... I just want to sit down and stitch by hand. Oh, sure -- I'm still doing the binding by hand, but that's not quite the same as doing quilting stitches. I guess you could say I've missed it a bit, since I was a hand-quilter for so long.

If you do any machine quilting (long arm or short arm), and you want to add something really special and fun to your quilts, try adding just a touch of hand stitching!

Here is a little whole cloth quilt that I did a few months ago.

I thought it would look nice with a little touch of color in the center. Here is a close-up of the machine embroidery that was added.

You can see that there are also hand quilted stitches a quarter of an inch away from the machine stitches. I like the effect of the two types of stitches combined! Each of the corners had a little heart inside of a square, and I think it really softens things up a bit when there are a few extra stitches added.