Wholecloth Quilting - Designing Your Own Motif

This is just an example of how you can quickly design a motif using the Ipad. I designed this motif using the Graphic App (formerly Idraw) which is an App you can purchase on the App Store for A$14.99.

This is a picture I found in a Dover publication '200 Victorian Fretwork Designs' by A. Sanguineti (I love fretwork!)
I took a photo of that little image and imported it into the Graphic App...does not look like much, but wait...

I then traced the photo with the Apple Pen...you can set it so that it automatically smoothes out the lines as you go, in addition to going back into it to smooth out some of the individual nodes. Not too difficult at all as most of the smoothing is already done by the 'smoothing function'. Did this a bit quickly as this was just to show you how this works, so there are a few wobblies here and there.

After some general tidy up, I had the image of the motif drawn as a continuous line design leaving it open at one end as I was going to connect it to another copy of it (copying the image and flipping it over horizontally). I think I may have grouped them together as one unit at this point (should have taken some notes!)

I have played around with something a bit similar in the past and knew that it needed to be less horizontal, so I turned the unit by 45 degrees, copied again and aligned it. This looked a bit more promising. Love the ability to just play around with the arrangements at this point.

I then grouped this into one unit, copying once again and flipping it over vertically to get the second half of my unit.

tada!!

Actually quite like this arrangement. Put another layer on to put it into a square to get the visual on how this would look in a quilting block. Instantly thought that I could extend this motif further by putting something into the corners as well, but I will stop here. This whole process took me about half an hour in front of the TV.  Now I could spend more time on this to make it absolutely perfect for tracing which is entirely do-able on the Ipad, but I think if I was going to use that I probably would import this into the computer drawing program to iron out some of the wobblies (mind you, have not explored all the drawing functions of this App as yet, i.e would like the stroke of the pen tool to be pointed...possibly has this in-build somewhere).

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this little play session on the Ipad...I certainly did. There is a letter box around the corner from my house that has a really nice motif on there...I am planning to inconspicuously walk past and take a photo to draw that out...perfect quilting motif!

Karin

Wholecloth Quilting - Your Own Design

Designing your own wholecloth quilt is a lot of fun but also a lot of work. There are several good books that describe the process and/or give you some design ideas , like
- Make Your Own Quilting Designs & Patterns by Judy Woodworth (super excellent resource)
- Create Your Own Dream Feathers by Peggy Holt
- Custom Curves by Karen McTavish
- The Secrets of Elemental Quilting by Karen McTavish

First of all you do need a set of tools...rulers, templates, circles, French Curves, ovals and/or stencils. I should also mention Cindy Needham's Handbooks which I forgot to mention in the last post as the place to go to if you are looking for stencils and design ideas.

So, how do you start? You can use paper to draw 1/4 of your design, flip it over and mirror it. You could then make several copies of the motif and lay them out on the table to have a bit of a look what this will look like. This is a very laborious process that takes a long time! Alterntively you could use mirrors to audition your design (also see You Tube video with Sharon Schambler on how to do this)

I prefer using the computer to design, making use of drawing programs. I have tried Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and finally ended up buying the Serif Draw 8 program. These are drawing programs that are not geared towards quilting but together with the EQ8 program I usually can make something work for me. I am currently having my eye on the Pre-Design program which is a 'lesser' version of the Art and Stitch program that is especially designed for quilters and embroiderers.

Carla Barrett's blog is an excellent source if you want to further delve into the world of digital wholecloth designing. Carla uses a tablet and Photoshop Elements (I believe). She teaches her method and also offers eclasses. Her blog is full of great inspiration.

Also useful and becoming more and more manageable is the Ipad, particularly when coupled with the Apple Pencil. With the help of some good Apps like Graphic (formerly Idraw), Adobe Draw or Sketch, Adobe Capture and many other Apps to choose from, you can get a fairly decent design to look at.
BTW, also  useful to audition quilting designs! Having a bit of a look what my feather design will look like in the melon shape. This was done on the Graphic App

In terms of process then, you start to doodle...maybe you have seen something that sparked your imagination, you could trace a design or you could use stencils or part of stencils. This is where Cindy Needham's Ultimate Stencil Collection comes into play

When I first got the Ultimate Shape Stencil I was so inspired I designed a range of weird and wonderful designs (see post HERE). I did use one of those designs to develop last years' wholecloth.

With the help of the Ultimate Round Stencil I came up with this center motif

...drawn onto the trusted Ikea paper. I then took this design and imported it into the computer drawing program where I tidied it up and traced it off so that I had a neat and precise copy to play with. I took my design then into the Adobe App on the Ipad and tried different layouts and different arrangements to see what I liked. This is what I settled on

The actual wholecloth turned out a little bit different but this picture gave me a good starting point
















Another example of a doodle I did, drawing a quarter of a design...very rudimentary and then duplicating it many times, arranging it into a square.  Here I did four quarters to make up one half of a design

Looks absolutely awful, however how good is this, I can wipe it and come up with a different arrangement. This was just to illustrate the process and to show you that it is possible to do some quite complex designs with the use of the computer or Ipad. If I liked this design, from here I would go and draw the design on paper properly, maybe then importing it into the computer to tidy it up before using it as a design to trace onto the quilt.

Next post I will show you how I traced a motif on the Ipad...need to split the post as this was just getting too lond

See ya'

Karin

Wholecloth Quilting - Development of Ideas Part 2

Following on from my last post, launching into part 2 of the development of ideas and how to go about designing your wholecloth. This is about medallion type wholecloth quilts that have a center motif usually surrounded by some background fillers and some borders.

My first introduction to this was through Patsy Thompson who was one of the experts on Quiltshopgal's FMQ challenge in 2012. While I did not directly participate in the challenge I was so inspired by her very simple, yet so effective method. She took a center motif and just went around adding border after border, increasing the width as she went along. I think I stitched this out in a couple of days

I was hooked. Next, I followed Patsy Thompson's style of creating wholecloth quilts which often start with a feather wreath in the center

All I did is add a background filler (in this case micro-stippling) and put some feather motifs in the corner. Very basic to start with, but I was impressed with these initial attempts.

As I went along and gained more experience with wholecloth quilting I started to get more elaborate and learned about some basic rules like:
- add several smaller borders around your center design and fill with simple designs like swirls, ribbons, loops or just lines; experiment with a straight square design or put the borders on the diagonal
- stick to a few selected shapes in your wholecloth
- work with repetition, i.e. have a motif that can also act as corner motif like in the following quilt
- think this through in terms of how much background you have to fill as this can take a long time to fill (i.e. see above...that micro-stipple was an absolute killer)

-  add interest by using grids and if you are really keen, learn how to fill those grids to really make your center design pop
- once the center design is done and you have decided on a background filler around it, add a few more borders, again keeping in mind to repeat already used shapes; you can see in the picture above that I put in a larger 'seed design' to enclose my center, thereby repeating the shape of the cnter motif. I then added some straight 1/4in lines to extend this out a bit and finished it off with a feather border.

This is one way to construct your wholecloth. While the result usually looks quite striking, the process is actually quite simple. In terms of designing this from scratch it depends on how much work you want to put into this and whether or not you enjoy designing. If you do not, you can make use of the many books that are on offer, all of which have a variety of motifs and designs, or find some spectacular motifs on the web for free. Or you can purchase stencils that are designed for wholecloth quilts. Here are some resources that I found useful:
books
- Quilting Wide Open Spaces by Judi Madsen
- Custom Curves by Karen McTavish
- Mix & Match Quilting Patterns by Helen Squire
- Inside the Lines by Pam Clarke
- The Secrets of Elemental Quilting by Karen McTavish

Some links
Quilting Creations  and
The Stencil Company for stencils and pre-printed wholecloth designs
Forest Quilting for free motifs
Cindy Needham's Craftsy Classes
Patsy Thompson's DVDs (particularly the Feathers DVD range)
Leah Day's Feather and Heart Mini Wholecloth (this is a workshop offered over on Leah Day's website; this was the first wholecloth I ever did and I remember the anxiety this produced just looking at it...however, as it is a mini project it was very achievable and turned out beautifully)
...and many, many more; hopefully this will spark your interest and you might give it a go.

Designing your own motif will take a little bit more time but is very rewarding.

Karin

Wholecloth Quilting - Development of Ideas Part 1

This is probably the hardest part. How often have you looked at a wholecloth in a quilt show and wondered how people come up with those brilliant ideas. This took me a long time to work out. I started to research this a bit over time and also delved into how best to draft designs. Over time I realised that there are a number of different ways on how to approach a wholecloth quilt. While you need to have some sort of inspiration to start with I believe the more critical point is how you are going to approach it. This dawned on me when I was doing a very traditional wholecloth quilt with a center motif last year. Thinking about this I started to categorise wholecloth quilts into several categories, i.e.

• An allover design consisting out of repeated motifs
• Medallion type quilt with a prominent centre design and various variations of that, i.e consisting of numerous borders or Mandala type quilts 
• Pictorial wholecloth quilts
• Modern wholecloth Quilts, and also 
• Rulerwork based wholecloth Quilts

Each of them will require a different approach to designing, different tools and obviously a different level of skills and I found it helpful to have that structure as a guide. So if I am inspired by a particular motif or design I will think about which category would be the best fit. Is it a smaller design which would lend itself to repeating it over the whole quilt or is it maybe a design that could be done with a ruler where I could then extend outwards. I am finding this a bit helpful as it will guide me to a particular way of designing it and gives me that overall structure to work from.

Looking then at the categories, my current project falls within the first category of an repeated all over motif. Must emphasise that this is not my original idea...I have seen this on Cindy Needham's

‘Wholecloth' Craftsy class a couple of years ago. I first used this in a pillow challenge that was run over at Quiltshopgal in 2015 (see my post HERE) For the challenge I took a seemingly very boring stencil, put it on point and repeated it. Looked absolutely fabulous!

I remember thinking then that this would make a lovely allover pattern for a wholecloth quilt.

You can apply this principle to all sorts of stencils and like I have done with my current project, mix and match different stencils together. The options are really limitless. Here are a few more ideas:

These two stencils are from Pam Clarke’s book 'Quilting Inside the Lines'. All I have done here is repeated the stencil in a straight way across the quilt. I particularly like the second one and you could imagine that you could now extend this out with a bit of a border maybe taking part of the motif and designing an accompanying border stencil or you could just simply stitch a very formal feather border around this. Or you could set this on point and have a bit of a look what that looks like...you can really play with this and come up with quite exciting ideas. I did this on the Ipad with the Adobe Draw App. If you prefer to work with paper you could copy your motif several times and lay it out in front of you to have a bit of a look.

If you look back over my most recent posts you will get an idea of how I tackled getting my motif repeated over my piece of fabric. 

Karin

Progress

Short post, working out how to get my photo onto this post from my Ipad at a reduced size and obviously managed after some unbelievable mucking around.

Making slow but steady progress

Karin

Wholecloth - Miscalculations and Other Disasters

Well, I would not have thought that I come across a major issue that quickly, but I did.

When putting down my framework I noticed that I did not have the planned 1/2in around the perimeter. Normally that would not matter as you have one solid piece of fabric, but for this one I added a border, so it did sort of matter.

When stitching out the framework, I thought that I had about 1/4in. The idea was to then stitch a 1/4in line around this...however, stitching this out I ended up a bit all over the place, sometimes hitting the 1/4 in mark and sometimes not. As you can see hopefully, I may have a bit more than 1/4in here to the border which is indicated with the red arrow. I think this occurred because the ruler work (you can see my 10in HQ ruler in the background) was much more difficult than I had anticipated and in the end I was just happy to get it down.

I then stood back and tried to figure out how to best overcome this issue. I had at least six arcs which were completely out. Decided to stitch a 1/4 in line around the perimeter to assess the issue. Did it at first in white thread which looked absolutely horrendous. Next issue presented itself...I have a light coloured backing! Thought that a black line would be nice, but then had to have the bobbin thread in beige to go with the rest of the back. Lots of tweaking, but I managed to pull this off in the end without pokies on the front or back. At least something was working.

That is just it with Wholecloth quilts. Things rarely go smoothly and you do come across a variety of issues as it is close to impossible to think everything through. The drawings always look great, are exact and cause no issues, but when you are dealing with fabric you could have some issues around shifting, compaction (which will affect your measurements) and all sorts of weird and wonderful things. You will have to decide what you can accept in terms of imperfection and what will continue to bother you.  Can you hide the imperfection or draw the eyes away from it? In my case I had to undo some of my arcs as they were just not meeting the 1/4in black line and this stood out like a sore thumb. Was very grumpy about this as doing the arcs was challenging. But, happy I did it in the end...looking good! So now I can pretend that I had wanted it this particular way in the first place😆

After I finished this I finally got around to insert the motif. Decided to trace and pounce it rather than stitching through the paper so that I would get the alignment right. Bit of a process...

Tracing and stitching through the paper to make the stencil...

Aligning and pouncing it with chalk...as you can see this is fairly faint and I must admit that I have mentioned to my family that I have once again surpassed myself in terms of crazy design ideas. This is indeed quite challenging.

And finally

Yep, made another mistake amongst all of that...traced the wrong drawing initially...the space between the two parts of the motif was a tad too wide, so will have to undo the two that I did already. The motif above is the right alignment and looks great. The joys of Wholecloth quilting. Hopefully it will be plain sailing from here on.

Amongst all of this our computer broke down...like really broke down, black screen, no play, so I had to figure out a different way to post. Lucky for me I had printed off what I needed for the center from the EQ8 program. By the time we get that fixed, I will hopefully be at the stage to do the borders.

Karin