Heart to Heart Runner Quilting

I've had a couple of questions regarding the quilting design on the Heart to Heart Runner, so I thought I'd share the process I went through. I'm pretty new to any quilting other than stippling, so this was a fun process.

First I have to say that I use Pinterest A LOT for inspiration and had seen something like this over there, so this is not an entirely novel idea.

I printed a diagram of the finished runner from the pattern.

I knew that I wanted to echo quilt around the hearts so, using good old tracing paper, I traced the hearts and added an echo line around each of them. (Ignore the "swirly" bits. That was my first, unsuccessful attempt at the design.)

On another piece of tracing paper, I traced the outline of the quilt, then removed that paper and just free-handed some lines. I think my previous experiments with Zentangles helped a little here.

Next, I overlayed this design over the previous tracing of the hearts, put a blank sheet of tracing paper over the top and traced everything. I then erased the bits where the lines went into the hearts, and adding a second line to the swirly design.

After this I marked the quilt top loosely resembling this design. I did not scale it up or anything, just kind of tried to duplicate it.

As for the actual quilting, I quilted the hearts in the ditch, then echoed about 1/4" away. After this I quilted the swirls following the lines I had drawn on the quilt top.

Next I randomly picked some filler designs (thanks Pinterest!) and filled the blank spaces. I tried to do it in somewhat of a logical fashion so it would look like everything flowed but I wasn't too scientific about it.

Lastly, I felt that the hearts themselves needed straight line quilting, since there was already so much swirliness going on. And that's it!

Be sure to look at my previous post for pics of the quilting detail.
The pattern is available on Craftsy and Etsy and is actually a fairly quick project since it's "just" a table runner and not a whole quilt.