June 2015 FMQ Challenge

Yah, I made it with only a few hours to spare until the end of the month.

This months' expert is Diane Gaudynski and I am following option 1 and 4.

To start off with I once again produced a drawing...took me a while until I was happy with it, but in the end I settled on this rather fanciful feather.

It got rather opulent on the sides which seems to almost overpower the stem, but in the end I had to stop drawing and just get on with it...

I traced the design on the silk with an air erasable marker using a light box. While I do follow my lines, people who use the air erasable marker would know that the lines become very faint very quickly. Combine that with the shiny silk and you hardly can see anything.

This is why the drawing is so important...I draw my plumes at a particular angle and at a particular shape, so even if I cannot see my lines a 100%, I can naturally complete the plumes the way I would have drawn them anyway. This was important for this piece as some of the lines faded to nothingness rather quickly. This also meant that I stitched out the whole piece in one go. Would have preferred to do this a bit more slowly, but was not sure how else I could mark the silk.

I used two cotton pieces for my batting...in retrospect, one would have been better, I think. The whole thing was just too thick and made the plumes rather stiff. I did try Cindy Needham's suggestion of using cotton and a thin wool layer, but wow...that requires another level of skill. Maybe I 'll try that another day. For now I just want to complete this pillow.

Almost done

Only the grids left to stitch out with the cathedral window design

Close up of the echoing...love the look of this!

 And here it is, the finished pillow, measuring 16 x16in approximately.

June 2015 FMQ Challenge

Stitched on Silk Dupioni using 100wt Invisafil thread. As you can see the colour of the silk looks slightly different in every photo as I have taken the pictures on different times in the day. The colour of the last photo probably comes closest. First time for me stitching on silk...I am impressed, to say the least.

Linking up to Quiltshopgal 2015 FMQ Challenge.

Karin

WIP: FMQ on Silk

I am in the midst of working on my pillow for the June 2015 FMQ Challenge over at Quiltshopgal. Fat chance of finishing on time...unfortunately I was out of action for a week and a bit this month. However, so be it, my pillow will probably be a bit late.

I thought I present a bit of a sneak preview of my FMQ so far on this pillow. I am learning so much...haha, and making sooo many mistakes!

First of, I decided to use a double layer of cotton for extra puff...yep, definitely got extra puff but it is a lot harder to work with as it is just puffing out all over the place and any little mishaps are easier to see. I did not have a definite plan for the fillers however did marvel over Diane Gaudynski's echo filler pattern that I saw on her blog. No matter how hard I looked, just could not figure out how she actually does the echoing. In the end I thought...well, this is a challenge, so just challenge yourself and do it! Rather than trying to work out how somebody else does it, I thought about how I would approach this. Started out and followed a 'Divide and Conquer' approach, i.e sectioning off little areas and then filling it in with an echo, stopping in the middle. After the initial first ugly shapes, I quickly picked up on how to make them visually more appealing and kept going. Must say, absolutely loved doing this...even though it looks a bit crazy with the lines being no more than 1/8in apart. Found that it went rather quickly as well and the flattening effect is just out of this world. Brilliant! Actually prefer this to microstippling.

I am doing a bit of mix and match fillers on this piece to keep it interesting, so further down I started microstippling for some transition and then launched into some swirls...but you can see that the irregularities in the lines of the swirls show easily due to the puff I have in the piece thanks to the double layer. Definitely not one of my brighter ideas. I am stitching with a 100 wt Invisafil thread with a 60/8 needle (on the 6D Dynamic Freemotion setting  of the Pfaff QE 4.2). The silk is finicky to work with and frays a fair bit...as I was aware of this beforehand, I cut my piece way bigger to allow for that. Stitching on the silk is nice, but it is not as forgiving as cotton...I feel that the irregularities are much more obvious...mind you I have been looking at this the whole day while stitching.

I have got a lot more bulk to tame...hopefully this will turn out. So far I have been able to literally FMQ the bulk out to the sides and have not had any problems. We'll see.

Linking up to WIP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced 

Karin