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