Insanity Plus

YES!, I finished micro stippling the centre of my wholecloth. This took forever ... as much as I like the texture and look, this was insane. The area to stipple was huge and I nearly gave up half way through. Came up with all sorts of excuses why I had to be doing something else...in the end, I perservered because I was also aware that if I stopped, it would be so much harder to pick it up again (and maintain the approximate size of the stipple).

Centre of Wholecloth finished

Look in the left hand corner...I bought some Pinmoors when I was ordering some supplies from the Internet the other day.  Leah Day uses them a lot so I am going to trial them a bit. Bought one packet which is not enough for a whole quilt but it is such a shift in what I am used to. Somehow they don't look secure enough, so I put the two in to see whether they fall out during the handling of the quilting. Of course, they don't, actually I was surprised how firm they are and am a bit amazed that they stay put. What I like about them is that they don't leave big holes when you pull them out and also they are of course, much easier to put in and pull out.

Anyway, for  the whole week I was going to start on a new baby quilt, washed all my fabric etc. but could not begin because I had this enormous area of the wholecloth to finish off (would be great to have two machines). Promised myself not to do this again...famous last words! In the end, I did not even like it anymore and thought it looked pretty boring. Mind you, also perfected my approach to micro stippling, i.e. be recklessly imperfect, stay in rows and vary your shape slightly for a nice interlocking design. Overall, I did a good job and any inconsistencies are really not noticeable ...the thread colour (I used Aurifil Mako 50/2) that I have chosen blends in perfectly and the 'bumps' across the quilt look quite natural.

I did this on my new Pfaff Expression 4.2 with the new Dynamic FMQ foot which is round rather than square. I had very good visibility with that foot and found that if I stayed in rows it was easy to anticipate how to interlock the stitching...problems only tended to present themselves when I got into an area where I had done some unexpected stitching, i.e. gone down too far on the previous row or left a bit of a gap in the previous row. In terms of shapes I think of Micky Mouse ears...as funny as that sounds...having that mental image helps me to stitch out a stipple. If I let go of that I find that I start losing myself in the shapes and end up just doing snake type lines.

 

The new machine has 3 LED light...very happy with this. This photo was taken at night while I was stitching (yep, any excuse did do to just do something different for a moment)...see the light in the right hand corner...just brilliant, made such a difference. I will have a break from this quilt now for a moment. For the borders I want to put in more feather designs both in the inner and outer border. This requires some marking and a lot of concentration.

Now I can set my machine up for piecing and finally start that baby quilt. Mind you, while I was stippling away I also had a brain wave for another design...I reckon I probably start  both because I am a bit curious as to what that would look like. Thinking about a multi coloured Dresden Plate where I could use up some leftover Jelly roll strips. Watch this space...

Linking up to Anything Goes Linky Party at Stitch by Stitch

Until next time

Karin