What I Decided To Do With The Little Quilt

I want to thank everyone who sent me advice and comments. I finally decided to do what my gut said in the beginning - hand quilt. It was suggested I use a red to match the appliqued piece, and I liked that better than my original idea for dark lines. 
I'll use an iridescent white thread to machine quilt the background. I'm thinking of a close meandering quilting to make the applique and the hand quilting pop. 
I originally started with a line drawing that was merely meant to be a root with some shoots. I was surprised when the drawing was finished to see that I had made a Hebrew letter - shin. This is the first letter of the shma, a prayer we say each day. I was always Jewish, but I didn't know it until a few years ago when I discovered my grandmother's really bad German was really Yiddish. Her family had kept being Jewish so secret that by the time my grandmother came along, she thought she really was Lutheran. I started looking at my roots off an on from the time my Grandmother wondered aloud about how her name and her siblings names were Jewish. Sydney, Benjamin, Esther (my grandmother), Harold, Alfreda, Naomi. Alfreda was named after my great-grandfather's mother, Alfreda Butz, a French Canadian who married an Englishman.