Borgello Hearts with Feathers Quilt

I saw something similar first time while looking for quilt designs. It immediately made its place in my heart.. I was eager to make this even though I had never made any quilt before, had never done any kind of free motion or even walking foot quilting but the design was so catchy that I had to make it. While looking for how to go about this I couldn't find the pattern and the place where I found I didn't trust the site. So I got my laptop out and went back to my engineering roots :) Microsoft excel was my best buddy for many days as I put numbers 1 to 16 in each row and column by looking at the quilt from the picture. Then I adjusted column width for each column to make sure the numbers start to look like heart. Conditional programmed the colors for these 1 to 16 fabrics till I could feel ok with the color combination.

Read a book on borgello quilting to realize I don't have to sit and stich rectangle by rectangle. Purchasing fabrics was interesting task too.. After seeing so much pink I was not able to see pink color shade differences very well so I took multiple photos to see what matches the combination I want :) When time came to cut the fabric, I was pretty nervous. We  were in apartment then, and I didn't own sewing table. So my sewing took place on our dining table. Living room floor was my place to lay our each column and its pieces and label them. The task was pretty exhausting and took couple or more months. During this time everyone who came to our place, would say this is craziness, and when I think back I feel was crazy :) Crazy for this quilt :)

Once the piecing was complete, I went ahead and watched multiple youtibe videos about feather quilting. Read couple of books to get the idea of what and how to go about it. But confidence was something I really lacked. So I started quilting with the straight line portions. It was tough due to its size. It was totally unmanageable with the sewing machine on the dining table. So I paused the work for a while. It was only few weeks back I got back to it. I used the pictures from the initial discovery site to decide where and what to quilt. Used blue water soluble pencil to draw the feathers.

Today's marathon quilting finishes the work on quilt. I made lots of mistakes and no where came close to what I saw but for a novice quilter, I am happy with what I have.. Feel like it was worth the effort.