June 2015 FMQ Challenge

Yah, I made it with only a few hours to spare until the end of the month.

This months' expert is Diane Gaudynski and I am following option 1 and 4.

To start off with I once again produced a drawing...took me a while until I was happy with it, but in the end I settled on this rather fanciful feather.

It got rather opulent on the sides which seems to almost overpower the stem, but in the end I had to stop drawing and just get on with it...

I traced the design on the silk with an air erasable marker using a light box. While I do follow my lines, people who use the air erasable marker would know that the lines become very faint very quickly. Combine that with the shiny silk and you hardly can see anything.

This is why the drawing is so important...I draw my plumes at a particular angle and at a particular shape, so even if I cannot see my lines a 100%, I can naturally complete the plumes the way I would have drawn them anyway. This was important for this piece as some of the lines faded to nothingness rather quickly. This also meant that I stitched out the whole piece in one go. Would have preferred to do this a bit more slowly, but was not sure how else I could mark the silk.

I used two cotton pieces for my batting...in retrospect, one would have been better, I think. The whole thing was just too thick and made the plumes rather stiff. I did try Cindy Needham's suggestion of using cotton and a thin wool layer, but wow...that requires another level of skill. Maybe I 'll try that another day. For now I just want to complete this pillow.

Almost done

Only the grids left to stitch out with the cathedral window design

Close up of the echoing...love the look of this!

 And here it is, the finished pillow, measuring 16 x16in approximately.

June 2015 FMQ Challenge

Stitched on Silk Dupioni using 100wt Invisafil thread. As you can see the colour of the silk looks slightly different in every photo as I have taken the pictures on different times in the day. The colour of the last photo probably comes closest. First time for me stitching on silk...I am impressed, to say the least.

Linking up to Quiltshopgal 2015 FMQ Challenge.

Karin