To-Do-Tuesday 22/3/23

Another week has passed with some progress. I seem to be working in starts and stops. 

My tasks for the week were:

 pin and baste another charity quilt

- make a start on the drawing of the wholecloth quilt✅

- make a few more scrap quilt blocks.

Lots happening over at our place though which did not leave a lot of time for quilting. We have been working on getting my father-in-law's house ready for sale. Just one more clean up around the house and then it is ready to go on sale after Easter. It's been a long and arduous journey and I will be glad when it is over. On the bright side though, it was also my birthday last week and I went online shopping...always great fun! Still had a voucher from Christmas for one of the local quilt shops. Got a few odds and ends but also purchased Bethanne Nemesh' Lily Love Line ruler #1. 

Had a try in the week on some scrap material

What an amazing little thing...the heart comes out at 4- 1/4in x 5in. I like the way that this stitches out...all done in one hit...shape, feathers and all. Very easy to do as it is not a huge ruler which can be massaged to go where you need it to be. Also interesting is the way Bethanne makes her rulers multi-purpose. This little heart shape can also be used for a quick border.

The border was incredibly easy to construct...no fuss, just flipping the ruler over to get the wave going with the end feather in place and then going back to just fill that in. Really liked this for a bit more of an informal border. The curl is not that deep, hence easier to fill, particularly if you put a few curls in the mix.

But back to my birthday...it's great getting older. Nobody knows what to get you and I always have quilt related ideas to fill that gap. I had my eyes on some Baptist fan rulers from Michael Quilts in Texas (?I believe) for some time, but so far had not acted on that as the postage is understandably high. Well, this is what we ordered for my birthday! Very excited about this as I think those rulers are the best thing since sliced bread. Have watched some You Tube videos, read the reviews...now just waiting to try them out. I will baste one of my little charity quilts so I am ready when they arrive. Looking forward to this and will report back on this of course.

In between I did more work on my wholecloth...I said I would be drawing this out, which I did, but I did it in the new drawing program (Affinity Designer 2). This was extraordinarily difficult, but as I had already started drawing it in the program I felt compelled to finish this to see whether I could pull this off. Probably should have started with a simpler design. Most of it was manageable until I decided to put some Amish Feather Curls in the border. While I am good at drawing and designing in general I did struggle with my spatial understanding or whatever you want to call this. Got very confused with the direction of the curls a number of times. I managed to draw one quarter and then had to mirror and rotate the piece to make up the border with the curls going around the border in the right direction and that is where problems started to occur...my quarters did not line up 100% and for the life of me could not understand what was happening. This is what I mucked around with for most of the week. It finally dawned on me where I had gone wrong (likely to do with me changing my snapping option a number of times and also going in individually to clean up some feathers, thereby ensuring that they would not match when tiled). The drawing by that state had an alarming amount of layers and little sub layers and it was absolute hell to try to fix some of that. However, I finally finished it and am happy with the alignments...it is almost perfect. There is a tiny mis-alignment in the feathers only which is not a big deal as I will simply correct this when I trace this onto fabric. Everything else aligns 100%.

Still got confused today when taping this together but am very happy with the result as I now have a workable copy to trace from. Mind you, this has also shown me with some certainty that I need to watch some more tutorials about this program...there is so much I do not know as evidenced when drawing this out. I did come across a few functions by accident that were extremely useful and powerful and I am certain there are lots of others that I could have employed to make the job easier. 

So, for next week I will concentrate on:

- putting my design together and starting to prepare the wholecloth; hopefully I will start with the marking, but we shall see. I am planning to stitch this out over the next two months

- baste a charity quilt ready for the Baptist Fan rulers; can't be long now...they went to Italy from the US, then to Qartar and should be on their way to Australia...

That's it...will leave it at that as I also have one more session of the Wholeloth workshop to do and realistically will not have time to do much else. Have several quilting projects though that will need to go back on the list when things quieten down a bit.

Linking up to To Do Tuesday#12 over at Quilt Schmilt. 

Karin