WIP: Wholecloth - Gridwork

I have been working away on my Wholecloth from Cindy Needham's Craftsy class 'Machine Quilting Wholecloth Quilts'.

This has been somewhat of an adventure with certain new revelations, i.e. I am a very messy marker and I also tend to mark/stitch first - think later. Several mishaps happened with the marking which meant I had to dampen some areas to get rid of some lines and yes, of course, that wiped some of my other lines...the whole thing looks fairly messy. However, I am doing this project just for fun and to further try out Cindy's  Ultimate Background Stencil Collection that I purchased for Christmas.

I did baste the way Cindy suggested by stitching a loose grid over the whole area and that worked great, however I will have to remember to stitch that in a different colour. As I was quilting along at times, I took some of the basting stitches out in order not to stitch over them and later discovered that I had also hacked into some of my gridlines by accident, hence had to re-stitch several lines!

Anyway, today I want to illustrate how easy it is to get something wrong. I was wanting to put a 1/2in grid into the central flower shape and marked this out nicely before basting. I thought I had paid attention to marking this grid on a 45 degree angle, however discovered a few days ago that I did exactly the opposite...I aligned the grid on the horizontal lines...

I even stitched this out before noticing...looking at it, I thought...wait a minute, this does not look right. Yep, sure enough...nice and horizontal. I think Cindy remarked in her class that this just does not look that good and looking at this, I could really see the difference this makes...

Lucky for me this was a small and defined area, so I went over my blue lines with the purple Air Erasable marker to put the grid on a 45 degree angle

Have a look at the difference

Looks much better.

At the moment I am working hard on being able to give this a once over spray with water...however I can only do that if all the major elements are stitched down. I did extend this Wholecloth and added a feather border...haha!...only to realise after basting that I had put my stencil the other way around which did not work that great with the corner motif.  So again I will use my Air Erasable marker and go over that to mark the spine in the right way, stitch it out and then finally spray this thing to get rid of the bulk of the blue markings as the general mess of the blue (and purple) lines is very distracting.

Remains to be seen how this will turn out

Linking up to Let's Bee Social over at Lorna's blog Sew Fresh Quilts.

Karin