Overall Feather Design

Well, I am back on my sitdown and very happy. Cleaned up the sewing room and made use of the now empty spare room to put the computer in. Feeling less crowded and things are much better organised.

Started on my workshop sample, just trialling different things that I want to cover in class. The sample gives me an idea on how long it approximately takes to stitch out the class content and also what size of practice samples should be cut out for class

I got side tracked, of course...started playing with rulers, tried different things, realised I had not covered what to do when your space is much bigger than you comfortably can stitch out. Overall very useful which will be used to finish off my handout. The class has now been scheduled for November so I am now well ahead ( which is handy as we are having overseas visitors at the end of July). Also found a new favourite feather border arrangement.

Its the last one in the lines of feather shapes. I think I took that inital feather arrangement from the 'Ambrosia' pantograph and then just continued with the same shapes in an arbitrary playful way. Looks quite nice and helps me to quilt in a little more informal way which I usually find quite hard. It seems that my muscle memorey is hardwired to do really formal feathers and any deviation is almost painful to execute. That was really fun to stitch out.

After that I continued on my mission to put an overall feather design on one of the charity quilts. I had practised this a bit both on the frame and now on the sitdown after seeing it on the website of StitchedbySusan. Like the texture of that design and thought that it could be potentially an easy way to get some charity quilts done.

So this is stitched edge-to-edge rather than allover, meaning I am going from left to right and then back again. This was certainly a challenge and I thought for a moment about doing an allover design - in which case I would have stitched this out in quarters turning the quilt clockwise after each quarter. However that would have meant that the feather plumes would go in different directions and I was not sure whether that would look any good so I stuck with the idea of edge-to-edge.

I found going from left to right easier than going the other way. Started in the middle of the quilt finishing off one half and then turned the quilt to do the other half. Must say, initially struggled a bit as I am also quilting on a larger scale but soon got into the swing of things. Happy to say that I did not get stuck anywhere and was able to move along quite quickly from row to row.

Came out ok, but not sure whether this is almost a bit much. It certainly has got a nice feel to it and looking at individual sections is lovely, even though the overall picture looks a bit crowded. I think I have another few scrappy quilts in my bundle of charity quilts. Might try it again maybe paying a bit more attention to the scale as some of my shapes are a bit irregular ( like instead of getting stuck I would make really long and big shapes to fill out a space 😆). Good experiment...took two afternoons to completion, so a good option for those charity quilts. Mind you, also could see this with a nice pantograph stitched allover!

Well, we shall see what I feel like next.

Karin