Designing

Radio silence from me again for a few days. I have been designing which always takes me some time to do. I have been asked to do another class next year doing a Mini Wholecloth class.

Initially I had no idea what to do, so several days were spent just thinking about how to approach this. I needed to come up with something that was achievable for the ladies without being too difficult to stitch out but also not to difficult to get down on fabric.  Up to now I have been designing using pen and paper which would take me ages as I would change things as I went along, then start over and over again until I got it right. When thinking about this class I realised that I needed a printed copy of my design and started to think about how to get my drawing into a digitized format. While I have drawing programs on my desktop I have never attempted to do a full blown design using a mouse, so the Ipad came to mind.

In the past I have used a very good App 'Graphics for Ipad' to do drawings on the Ipad, however I recently discovered that this App has stopped working properly possibly due to the many updates for the Ipad that have happened over time. I really liked this App as it allowed me to smooth out curves, add measurements etc. However, the layer tap does not work anymore and without that, it is useless.

When I had Covid earlier in the year I spent a lot of time just sitting around. In order to keep myself semi occupied I started to look at the Procreate program. I had purchased that App some time ago but never really got the hang of it, so I set out to learn it properly. Discovered that it is extremely useful to quickly draw out a draft of something, e.g. like this

Not that pretty and not what I am going for, but I was just playing around with ideas and to familiarise myself with the program again. Spent a lot of time searching for a way to make a shape to scale and finally figured it out. When you highlight a particular shape in the Procreate program it will show you the measurement in Pixels. Took me a while but with the help of Google I found a formula to convert pixels into inches. I wanted my heart shape to be about 2-1/4in, so that meant that I had to multiply this with the dpi which was 300 which made that 675 pixels and...voila...I was on my way (Actually just found a pixels converter on Google which does the calculation for you). Once I had this, I also discovered that I could set the grid behind my picture in inches, so I made my grid 1/4in small so I could see how I would fill in the space that I had given myself for this Mini Wholecloth.

The drawing itself was actually not too difficult, just had to adjust the brushes to make my strokes as even as possible. Good thing is that you only need to do one shape and then of course can copy and paste as your heart desires. Here is my frame

Does not look like much but that took a while. Spend some time getting that first stroke right. Once I had that, I just copied, flipped and pasted it into place, tidying up some pixels as I went. Reduced that shape then by 1/4in to make the distinct frame which comes out to 9in. Once I had that, I worked out the size of the heart motif and put that in the middle and I was on my way.

Still working on this so I can't show you the full picture but the printing of this comes out 100% to scale which I am extremely happy about as this means I can just print it out at the end of it and trace from there. 

If you have an Ipad it is well worth your while to invest some time into something like Procreate. Even if you don't design full blown wholecloth quilts, it does allow you to quickly and effectively just jot down a draft which I always find very helpful. Like that first picture above felt like a good idea and would have taken me ages to draw out on paper...on the I pad it maybe took an hour to get the base shapes on there and then copying and pasting, a bit of rough filling to get an idea of whether I liked it which in this case I did not (would need more work around the angle of my feathers somehow).

Karin

Quilts Do Talk!

I made a start on my Scrappy Houses quilt. I pieced this during lockdown and had everything prepared, even the binding. First I needed to cut my pieced backing to size.

Pin-basted for a good half day to preserve my back taking it real easy.

Thinking I was going to do either an edge-to-edge or an overall design, I spent some time machine basting the whole thing to get rid of all the pins in preparation for this. I used a fairly thin (Warm & Natural) batting for a bit of a change and while I was machine basting  I was really quite taken with its flatness. Funny enough I machine basted it in a grid when normally I would have just noodled all over it, so I think my head was already going into a different direction.

This quilt is for us...for next winter in front of the TV. I need this to be well quilted, but pliable and soft at the same time. As I was stitching along I was actually quite taken with how marvelously straight everything was (not the usual for me) and started thinking about the quilting process. Doing an allover design would work great on a scrappy quilt however could also mean that some of my sashings would not appear as straight due to going over at different angles and through some of the pushing and shoving that occurs going through the throat space of the sit down machine. 

Also remembered that some of our well used quilts from years ago when I was just starting off and did mainly overall meanders showed some weakness around the seams in the borders as I did not ditch them. I could, of course, ditch around major seams and then do an allover design...but doubt had set in. I really quite liked the strong geometric look.

Then I looked at my houses...they just look great and I thought that they maybe should be brought out more.

Long story short...this quilt was screaming at me to be quilted in the ditch! So I am thinking that I will SID around the major seams and houses and then do some loose background fill around the houses in each block to bring them out more. Probably will leave sashings blank but put some sort of geometric design in the border. Again, it will have to be something simple, so the whole thing does not get too stiff. Or maybe a more organic border design...I have got some nice designs in the many books and resources that are floating around (which I re-discovered during my recent clean-up of the sewing room). 

So what started out as ‘let’s just quickly finish this’ will take considerably longer, however I am actually quite excited about this. Should be good fun.

Karin