Quilt along #15 - Sharp Stippling

I am participating in Leah Day's Quilt Along Wednesdays and after some months of stippling we are off to try some different designs. This week we are looking at Sharp Stippling.

Watched the video and off I went:

Started just doing a row of flame like shapes (about 1/2" scale) and kept going in rows....hmm...not quite as easy as I thought. I could not go much beyond doing rows of the shape. The interlocking of the design somewhat eluded me. I then tried to do it on a smaller scale really concentrating on trying to add some complexity and variation:

My stitching became smaller and smaller...I think that this is about 1/4" scale. Very wobbly in terms of consistency of stitching and the variation in the shape was still a bit 'hit and miss'. I liked the way that this did not seem to matter much in the overall look of the design. The areas don't seem to have to be consistent to look good. Stitching it, I felt that I could not get the 'rhythm' of this design. I needed some sort of image to think about while doing it, similarly to stippling which I originally learned thinking very hard about Mickey Mouse ears. If I just think of flames I seem to produce consistent rows of flames...so I included some 'bird' shapes:

This worked a bit better for me...less concentration and more mental images. I went back to a scale of about 1/2" and think that this looks quite respectable. I have got a few larger unquilted areas in it when I could not decide what shape I was going to pursue, but overall the texture is lovely. Quite a nice design but I don't think I could stitch it any bigger than the 1/2" scale.

Questions:

- how do I get the rhythm of a design? I do doodle the design before I actually stitch it, but that often does not give me the 'flow' or 'rhythm' of it because as soon as I hesitate while sewing I usually loose the general direction in which I am heading. (Maybe I am going too fast in general or it simply needs more practice)

- I am thinking of doing all these practice samples on solid fabric (of which I got stacks) and then later on stitching them together using the Quilt-as-you-go method. Would I just mark myself a square on my fabric and just stitch within that or stitch all over my sample and cut it to size later (wouldn't that become undone then?) when attaching the sashing?

Now off to do some quilting

Karin