Why hand stitched?

During the last 11 years I have been hand quilting, machine quilting - but for years my quilting remained just a secondary structure to the pieced top. I chosed hand quilting when i wanted to bring a kind of softness into the composition like in my Cityscapes #5.

Cityscapes #5, detail

Also in my big-sized Color Composition #1, 2 and 4 I've chosen hand quilting, which was still a secondary structure to the composition. 

Color Compositions #4 - detail

But slowly I got really attached to hand quilting and realized that for me it was more a personal mark-making process, unique and special. Like comparing commercial fabrics and hand dyed fabrics. So I asked myself, if quilting is a kind of mark-making and not just an utilitarian connection in between the three layers of the quilt, than it doesn't need to be a secondary structure.

Of course, I wasn't discovering something earth shatteringly new, just think of the trapunto quilts, but it made me look around and explore stitching as a mark-making, and especially the mark-making techniques in the arts. This exploration coincided with Dorothy Caldwell's workshop on Human Marks and I came to the conclusion that I can enrich my quilts by using stitching instead of quilting (here I mean quilting in a traditional sense). 

This process of exploration resulted in my Human Marks series, which I wrote up in my blog and which I won't repeat here. 

I wasn't only looking for visual inspirations but practical advices as well, like how to make my marks. I will discuss these inspirations next time.