WIP: FMQ on Silk

I am in the midst of working on my pillow for the June 2015 FMQ Challenge over at Quiltshopgal. Fat chance of finishing on time...unfortunately I was out of action for a week and a bit this month. However, so be it, my pillow will probably be a bit late.

I thought I present a bit of a sneak preview of my FMQ so far on this pillow. I am learning so much...haha, and making sooo many mistakes!

First of, I decided to use a double layer of cotton for extra puff...yep, definitely got extra puff but it is a lot harder to work with as it is just puffing out all over the place and any little mishaps are easier to see. I did not have a definite plan for the fillers however did marvel over Diane Gaudynski's echo filler pattern that I saw on her blog. No matter how hard I looked, just could not figure out how she actually does the echoing. In the end I thought...well, this is a challenge, so just challenge yourself and do it! Rather than trying to work out how somebody else does it, I thought about how I would approach this. Started out and followed a 'Divide and Conquer' approach, i.e sectioning off little areas and then filling it in with an echo, stopping in the middle. After the initial first ugly shapes, I quickly picked up on how to make them visually more appealing and kept going. Must say, absolutely loved doing this...even though it looks a bit crazy with the lines being no more than 1/8in apart. Found that it went rather quickly as well and the flattening effect is just out of this world. Brilliant! Actually prefer this to microstippling.

I am doing a bit of mix and match fillers on this piece to keep it interesting, so further down I started microstippling for some transition and then launched into some swirls...but you can see that the irregularities in the lines of the swirls show easily due to the puff I have in the piece thanks to the double layer. Definitely not one of my brighter ideas. I am stitching with a 100 wt Invisafil thread with a 60/8 needle (on the 6D Dynamic Freemotion setting  of the Pfaff QE 4.2). The silk is finicky to work with and frays a fair bit...as I was aware of this beforehand, I cut my piece way bigger to allow for that. Stitching on the silk is nice, but it is not as forgiving as cotton...I feel that the irregularities are much more obvious...mind you I have been looking at this the whole day while stitching.

I have got a lot more bulk to tame...hopefully this will turn out. So far I have been able to literally FMQ the bulk out to the sides and have not had any problems. We'll see.

Linking up to WIP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced 

Karin