Now that I’ve got the base background settled, I’m following a variation of my original idea, which was a large circle in the middle with narrower stripes of the same colors, also step-pieced in the middle.  In this version, I would have had a brightly colored bias tape descending and ascending along the middle of the large stripes, swirling in the center to make a heart within the large circle.  Then I though, maybe I’ll just make a heart instead of a circle.  I got out my nice big newsprint pad.

My favorite size of newsprint!

Using the techniques most of us learned in kindergarden, I folded a large sheet in half, and cut out one half of a heart, then opened it out to a full symmetric heart.

Here is the symmetric heart

This, however, looks a bit too stabile, not enough in motion.  So I trimmed the heart to make it asymmetric, suggesting movement.

Here is the asymmetric heart

This is the version I decided to stay with.  I like the size of the heart on the background, and the dynamic feel of the asymmetry.

Next up:  Making the stripes for the heart.

The first step was to cut the quilt in half and resew it so that each side had alternating stripes:

Here is the quilt cut in half vertically and reattached for opposing stripes

And here is where the improv comes in.  My eye says it is too tall for its width, for the effect I imagine.  So here are three cropped version, to help me decide how many rows to remove from the bottom.

Wedding quilt with 1 row removed.

Wedding quilt with 2 rows removed

Wedding quilt with 3 rows removed, 5 remaining.

So I look at these each, one at a time.  The seven-row version looks better to me than the original 8 rows.  I like the six-row version even better.  The five-row version looks too wide for its height.  This proportion is certainly not an absolute, it is in the context of the end-product design I envision.  So that narrows it down to using either 7 or 6 rows.  After consideration, I decide to go with the 6-row version.  It has an even number of dark and light stripes on each side, which strikes me as appropriate for a wedding quilt, where two people are coming together as equals.