Progress On Wholecloth

Well, I have been basically missing in action...stitching away on my Wholecloth. There is only so many photos and posts you can do about the same thing! This has been very challenging as some of my lines were not marked on straight and with added compaction this turned into a right old nightmare (every end of almost every line was about half an inch out - not really sure what happened here). In the end, the only way to achieve straight lines was to stitch the straight lines with a ruler. I silently cursed myself for putting in three lines 1/4in apart from each other just for a bit of pizazz.

Anyway, here is the completed orange peel design stitched with the Clarity Ruler foot and the Westalee Clamshell template. While I dreaded this, this turned out quite 'easy' and looks fabulous.

Nice and even...seriously worked like a dream with a little bit of fudging to fit it into the compacted space. Next came those lines. I did need a few attempts but finally got there. Once the first line was down straight, the others followed a bit easier. Probably one of the more challenging things I have done in a while because the tiniest of deviation was very obvious when looking at it.

After the lines I tackled the structure of the grid because the compaction was getting obvious. I love grids but must admit, I forgot how much work they are. While I could have done this also with the ruler foot, I decided against it as I wanted a tidy and secure beginning and end of each line (not that the FMQ beginning and end is untidy, but doing it with the walking foot was just neater - I tie the ends off the same way a longarmer would do it, which makes for a very neat beginning and end). This took forever as this left me with gazillions of threads to bury as I went along. Again my marking left a lot to be desired in parts and a few corrections had to be made here and there. I am truly the world's sloppiest marker.

With that done I needed to do the feather border before continuing to fill the center and this is how far I got to date

I did spray the corners of my border as this got really messy with my blue marker and I find this distracting when I quilt. You can see the compaction that has occurred and it is going to be interesting to see how well the center can be filled. Theoretically this should all be flattened. The feathers turned out beautiful once I got rid of some of the blue marker

I like the feathers just dancing around the outside...not sure yet exactly how this will end up and none of this is exact in terms of its placement. I will probably go back into the feathers to in-line them and make them a bit more pronounced, but we shall see. Next I will have to tackle the center of this Wholecloth, then fill in the grid (probably with the cathedral window design and then it is back to the feathers.
I am thinking of calling this 'Wedgewood meets Brass'. Wedgewood from the beautiful Aurifil colour that is called Light Wedgewood and Brass from the odd colour of this shot cotton which is woven with bright blue and almost orange threads. It should look great once all the blue muck is rinsed off but it may not be to everybody's taste. Doesn't matter...main thing is that I liked it when I started it. As I have been working on this for the past month I am already a bit over it, however I am curious about how this will turn out once it is all done.

Karin