Some things take time

I have been noticeably absent from blogland in recent times. No particular reason, other than that I have been busy in general and have not had the peace and quiet to do anything too complicated.

Haha...and what I have been playing with has taken me three attempts to get down on fabric...and I am talking about tracing a simple stencil!! How hard can this be. I am finally getting around to doing this little project from Cindy Needham's class 'Wholecloth Quilts'. Highly recommended...very informative class and Cindy is a brilliant teacher. So I am following the steps in constructing a wholecloth...enlarged the stencil and got ready to trace it.

As the stencil left some options to either trace or not I thought I would make decisions about this as I went...too funny! First time around, I ended up tracing the whole thing (which measures about 19in), only to decide that I did not like the way it looked. As I was using a blue water soluble marker, no problem, I just rinsed it again.

Next time around, I decided that I wanted a particular section in the stencil, then changed my mind, then messed it up again and then drew different ideas all over the cloth. I should have taken a photo of that...a most liberating exercise. Another wash of the fabric. This time I had a bit of a think and decided that I liked the stencil as it was in the first place and went with that, only changing the middle section a bit.

A little bit messy as I am also using it for grid practice and one of the grids was too big so I ever so carefully wet it and redid the grid which left a fair bit of blue marker pen all over the place. But this is it...it is marked and ready to go. I am going to go slowly on this and follow Cindy's advice from the class about the basting and quilting the main sections first. Looking forward to this, even though it is only a bit of a practice piece...actually any excuse will do to just sit down and do a bit of FMQ.

Also re-discovered my Sensormatic FMQ mode on the machine. Brilliant to quickly try out a design as the foot just clips on, so you don't have to muck around with set up too much. Need to use this more often...                                                  
                                                                     

        

    

Apart from this I am spending some time coming up with my own Mandala design for a smaller Wholecloth...but this is so far in its infancy stages...

So lots of ideas, lots of mucking around and very little to show for it.

Karin