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

Quilt Along #4

This week's focus was on stitching on a line. I was dreading this a bit thinking that this would surely not work for me. I must say though, I had a lot of fun with this. It was a lazy Saturday...very hot over here, so there was not much else to do but to stay inside the air conditioned house. Sat down at the sewing machine and just went for it. Here are my lines:

Bit hard to see on the front, so here is the back

I was amazed with the result. The stitching was not too bad at all. The only problem I had was that as soon as I stopped, I sort of continued with a bit of a jerk in the line before I could straighten myself out again.The other issue was the change of direction - in anticipation of the change I would generally start making tiny stitches when approaching the change or produce a knot as I missed the point of turning and obviously stitched on the spot. This got a bit better once I tried a few more lines.

The next thing I tried was the motif. I got a quilt pounce for Christmas so this was the perfect opportunity to try this out. Worked like a dream and I got a bit carried away with this and kept going on this tiny sample. I used 50/3 Gutermann thread with a 80/12 needle. If I was doing this on a quilt I would probably use Aurifil 50/2 so that the build up of stitches would be less noticable.

Great fun. I find that I often do really well on my samples but when it comes to a real quilt I get some sort of stage fright - I could really relate to Leah's post about 'fear' the other day. This year I promised myself that I would not give in to this and move out of my comfort zone. With this in mind I recently finished a quilt with a basic feather wreath in the alternate block. Nearly jumped off again with thinking that it wouldn't work, would take too much time, let's just quilt in the ditch and so on... I persisted and as I had to do 15 motifs I had no choice but to become comfortable with it.

One of the many samples before I went onto the quilt with it. Not perfect, but good enough.

 Back to the Quilt Along. Next I tried following a pattern and stitiching-in-the-ditch

This worked fine except I think I need heaps more practice on the quilting-in-the ditch. Had the same issue as above - as soon as I stopped, I did some jerky type stitches before I got going again in a straight line. I also could not stay in the ditch at all times. What a timesaver though! Would be good to be able to do this and not constantly have to get up to change the quilt around. 

Karin