OMG: February--Pink Ribbon Heart Quilt

I've been really excited about quilting during this first month of 2016, and I'm already looking forward to setting my goal for February.

Last month I finished my Marina's Garden Quilt.  I went through the usual love-hate-love-hate-LOVE with that quilt as I was working on it.  I also started the Project 48 Quilt, and look forward to the new block release every week--thank goodness the hosts are in Australia, so I only have to wait until Thursday night!  And the Finish-a-Long Q1 goal setting has gotten me to take a good hard look at some of my UFOs and quilty plans.
I will say that I am in love, love, LOVE with Electric Quilt 7 again.  Why, oh, why did I not install that on my last laptop.  But then I'd have a hundred more UFOs in the mix by now.  EQ7 has really help me visualize the ideas in my head, and realize when some of them aren't as good as I thought.  And it's also pushed me in directions I never thought I'd take.  My Paradiso Layers-of-Charm quilt ended up going in a much more modern direction than anything I've done in the past.  And while the coral pink may not have been the best choice for a solid, I'll learn to live with it (that love-hate-love thing again).
Anyway, enough rambling about other projects.  On to February's goal!
So many of my projects these days start out with "this is something I started so long ago, I've forgotten when," or "these are blocks I bought off eBay so long ago, I've forgotten when."  Well, February's project is no exception.  A long time ago American Patchwork and Quilting had a charity auction of pink heart blocks on eBay to raise money for the Susan G. Komen Foundation.  I can't remember if you knew what blocks you were bidding on, or if it was the luck-of-the-draw.  I won 9 blocks.  One of them is a abstract pink heart appliqued on a white background.  The other 8 are pieced blocks meant to be a heart with a border/corner blocks.  I really am not crazy about the 8 blocks.  They're two pale to show of the heart shape, in my opinion.  But they're in my stash and I feel I owe it to them to do something with them all.  February and Valentine's Day (and my anniversary) seemed like the right time to bring them out and turn them into something.

Which of course had me playing around in EQ7 tonight.  I love actually working on a project to learn new things in the program.  I (re)learned how to upload a picture and trace it to make an applique block.  When I dug the actual blocks out of my stash, I came across some fabric yardage that I had bought years ago to go along with the blocks.
I first created the layout that APQ more or less suggested in the instructions they sent with the blocks.  That's the one in the upper left.  But of course I couldn't stop there.  I got the idea of maybe a medallion quilt or some other not-as-traditional arrangement for the blocks.  Combing through the EQ7 Library, I came up with the other 8 ideas.

The scrappy sort of not-quite-log cabin in the lower left appealed to me, so I explored that one some more.  Adding in more fabrics (purples I saw in my stash), and elongating the main blocks so that they would be 15x20 to make a 45x60 lap quilt (I seem to be all about turning things into lap quits this past month).  I'm leaning in the direction of the larger blocks, with pink and purple fabrics added around the heart blocks in an improv fashion to get to the finished 15x20 size.

My goal for February is to at least get the quilt top pieced.  Quilting will have to wait until I can figure out a space large enough for basting.  (So I can get my Paradiso quilt basted, as well.)
Seems I've gone back to writing long, rambling blog posts, too.  Forgive me.