Let's Do Some Ruler Work #11

I have this piece of silk that I was saving for something, not sure what, so it has been sitting around in my stash for some years by now. The problem with silk for me is the marking, still not entirely sure what people use, however I finally put it to good use, stitching out the Heartfelt Wholecloth Quilt  designed by Kelly Ashton using all the rulers of the Handiquilter Ruler of the Month Club 5 (as this meant minimal marking). No better way to get used to some of these rulers then to use them in an actual project. I ended up marking the silk with a fine chalk pencil, thinking that this was going to come off with some heat...not sure how I got mixed up but that is actually not the case, so I am going to have these lines in there. Hopefully they will be quilted over or rub off with time. If worst comes to worst, I will have to wash this thing when it is finished.

So I made a start with the Double Heart Ruler and promptly had to do it again as my hearts kept overlapping which I did not like. Found the ruler quite challenging actually as it is just that little bit chunky. Also was using the stitch regulator for some practice which added some difficulty, however I got there in the end. The silk itself is very forgiving which surprised me a bit. Really enjoying stitching on silk (using Aurifil 50/2 thread in a coordinating colour).

So far, so good, except there were no measurements in the instructions, so I felt that I was doing this a bit blind. I was supposed to stitch another hexagon around the center going from circle to circle and initially my hexagon was going to end up somewhat misshapen. Had to improvise a bit and make it fit to  come out with an accurate hexagon shape.

This has taken most of the day. Managed to get the hexagon around the center and then tackled the wavy line. You can see above some of the rulers used so far (from left to right: Half Carat Diamond Ruler, Double Heart Ruler and the Wavy Line Ruler). I was dreading the wavy line a bit because I already knew it would not fit neatly into my space. I usually draw out my wholecloth quilts so that I can work out how things fit into spaces as I am not really good at just winging it. Must say this was an excellent exercise for me and I finally 'got it', i.e. how to assess in a roundabout way how this was going to fit and then, while going along, ever so slightly shifting the ruler over to make up that 1/4in that I needed to keep the corners approximately the same. Then I echoed around it which was surprisingly easy, although I went at absolute snail pace to get that right.

A close up of my handiwork

Not exact by any means but workable. Really enjoying the challenge. 

Here is another photo of the psychodelic silk. It shimmers all sorts of colours..this probably comes closest to what it actually looks like.

Now it is time for the Linky. Would be great to see what other people are working on with rulers. If you are currently working on something that involves rulers or have an old post, please consider sharing. 

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Karin

Progress on Wholecloth

I get a bit obsessive from time to time 😆...I am used to it and know that I just have to run with it. If I don't, then I get stressed about not being able to follow my compulsions, bit of a vicious cycle really or, at least for me, the workings of the creative mind.

I have been stubbornly working away on my whole cloth border, beginning to doubt my own sanity. This was incredibly challenging and I was quite proud of myself to let many, many imperfections go. 

Here is the very last section to complete, pounced on and ready to go

Must admit that I was utterly amazed at this point that this actually had worked out, looking very pretty and frilly...just like I had imagined it.

So, onto the next slightly crazy idea...pebbles

Given that I had an unplanned 1/4in space I had decided earlier to fill that with pebbles and make it part of the overall plan. Turning out to be a bit of an additional challenge as I am quilting directly against the border which is pieced. So have to concentrate a fair bit to not go over the seam into the border...on the dark material that is very noticeable and distracting. 

Also, notice that space in the corner...still have not found a proper solution for this. The motif itself does not fit in the corner unless you cut it off half-way (how on earth did I not think of this beforehand!). Did not like the look of this and have tried to come up with an alternative which is proving to be a bit tricky. Have to still try out a few different ideas, however if they do not work,  then will just have to echo it. 

All in all though, very happy with my efforts...from UFO in my cupboard to completed vision, albeit slightly different. Will need to order some more of that charcoal fabric as I do not seem to have enough for the binding and then it will be done!

Will post some pictures of the completed quilt once it is washed (it's full of chalk) and bound and hopefully looking very pretty from at least 2m away. Still debating whether it should go into our local quilt show, but we shall see.

Karin

Almost Finished

I have been steadily working away on my practice wholecloth. Started a rather crazy background filler

...and once started had to continue with it. Was a bit unsure of it as it is a rather playful background in a very traditional design. Grid probably would have been better but I did not feel like it. The texture this produced is really amazing and it does look interesting.

Today I finished the whole piece. Spend half of the day putting in a piano key border. This was not part of the original plan but I had so much fabric left over on the sides that I thought it was a pity to waste all of that.

I used my favourite ruler from the Handiquilter Ruler of the month program - the Line Grid ruler

This ruler is very easy to hold and produces very straight lines. Worked well and went along rather quickly. The only thing that drove me crazy was the Handigrip tape on the back. As I was stitching close to the batting, the end of the ruler really gripped hold of the batting all the time. In the end I took the Handigrip strip off on one end to be able to move the ruler more easily. That worked fine as I still had all my other Handigrips strips on the top. I am actually quite amazed on how evenly and straight this turned out. The only marking that I had  to go by were the center lines on all four sides.

End result before I gave it a bit of a spray with water to get rid of some of the blue marker pen that was still hanging around in some places.

Next comes the binding, then a proper wash and I will need to block this one properly as the tight background is trying to pull the whole thing in a bit. So, a little bit of work ahead still.
This was good fun and a really useless exercise in terms of just focusing in on some ruler practice, while at the same time just going for it and seeing how this would turn out. Love those types of projects.

Karin

Intense Learning Time

The Australian Machine Quilting Festival 2016 is over. I have been on leave for the last few days and I have not done one scrap of quilting. In fact, my sewing room is such a mess that I would need to clean up before doing anything. And I am exhausted...I went for 3 days straight...on the bus, to town every day with lots of walking in between.
I am still on my design kick and am going through a very steep learning curve.
I took a class with Claudia Pfeil at the Quilt Festival which was about designing Wholecloth quilts. While this was a great class, it did not give me what I needed...we basically designed a Wholecloth around different size borders, similarly to an exercise I once had done with instructions from Patsy Thompson. Don't get me wrong, Claudia Pfeill's Wholecloth quilts were lovely and I don't want to knock the class. It was fun and it certainly is one way to go about designing a Wholecloth.

Not sure what I was looking for...I looked around the show and came across a really fantastic book by Judy Woodworth (as well as another book from Karen McTavish...how many books do I need?). The title looked promising

This book is very good and includes the 'how to', what tools to use, a little bit about feathers, designing a pattern, designing a Wholecloth quilt, some of Judy's designs and much more... it even has a section on thread painting. She certainly packed a lot of information into this one book! While I had come across many of the ideas in the book, it did make me stop and analyse where my 'block' is. I have got a lot of great tools (i.e Cindy Needham's stencils, rulers, gadgets...), I can draw somewhat and I can come up with little ideas...the issue centers around visualising the bigger picture and seeing it come together as a unified whole where you can see how things fit together and have a look at the general design, proportions and placement.

Now you can go and draw these things by hand, then make multiple copies like I have done the other day for an allover Wholecloth, however for a detailed design that becomes incredibly laborious. I did experience this in the last few months with my Mandala design...I spent weeks on getting my drawing right to the point of stitching with lots of time spent on redrawing sections I did not like...the stitching was really the easy part!

I have got EQ7 and that does help a bit, however EQ7 is not a drawing program. While it is do-able (i.e you can import an image), I was starting to realise that I need to make my life a bit easier. I have got an old version of the drawing program 'Serif Draw Plus' and finally went ahead and updated this to the newer version yesterday. Oh, the bliss...should have looked at this earlier as they have made several excellent improvements...now you can trace shapes with a B-spline curve which in my simple terms fixes the curve as you go along. Tracing on the computer has been incredibly difficult for me in the past, but with this new tool this is a breeze...a little bit like magic
So I drew a little design of just one small curl for testing and here is how that evolved into something quite usable

Scanned the drawn image of one curl (no doubt influenced by Karen MacTavish' book) into the drawing program, traced it with the B-Spline tool which was super easy, little bit of a tidy up here and there, re-sized it and made multiple copies on the page I was working on, grouping two together as a motif and then arranging them in this frame. Grouped together like this, I now have the freedom to enlarge or reduce, change the thickness of the lines, add or remove sections etc. Imagine this filled in with some featherwork...this could look quite good! I might even attempt to draw some feathers in the program...need to experiment more with this.Also played with the Autotrace function which the old program also featured, however I had only used this sporadically.

 Look at this traced image

Wrapping Paper - copyright 2013 of the Wrapping Paper Company (wwwwrapco.com.au)

Taken from some wrapping paper that had these pretty images of roses all over. I could have traced this, however that would have taken some time. In addition, it probably would have had some issues as I am not sure whether each shape would have to be closed or not. Still learning about this. I probably would have gotten there in the end, however here is where Autotrace came in handy. Had to do some tweaking but this came out unbelievably pretty and clear, considering it was set on a brownish background...autotraced the shape, got rid of the background with the cut out feature and now had an image that could be re-sized, coloured etc. Very impressed with that little test. So if I am really lazy, I could draw my feathers and have the program autotrace them. This is very neat.

Next thing I will do is to scan Cindy Needham's Master Copy of her Ultimate Stencils into the drawing program to use as a background to draw on. This way, I can 'play' with concepts for block designs on the program before drawing out the detailed design (idea came from Quiltshopgal who spoke about importing this to EQ7 the other day). This will save some trees...you should see all my drawings all over the place!

I am actually quite excited about this. So from last week's allover Wholecloth I now have at least three additional quilts in my head. The rate I am going I am not going to have time to do any quilting!
Experimenting, learning the improved program, trying out different ideas and designing workable patterns takes time.

Karin

Doodle Follow up

I made multiple copies of the designs that I doodled the other day using Cindy Needham's Ultimate Shape and laid them out to see what this would look like for an allover Wholecloth
No 1

Motif a bit too big in there but nice overall design with the symmetrical feathers.

On point

No 2...turned out a bit wild

Bit on the busy side

On Point

Now you could play around with toning this down a notch by maybe only using every alternative block and putting something a bit calmer in its place.

No 3

A favourite

Here again on point

I then took one of the copies and imported this into my EQ7 program as an image. Bit of advertisement for EQ7 here...I struggle to visualize whole quilts and bought the program some years ago to assist with that. It's got a lot of neat features, but the best is still that you can see a quilt in its entirety before you make it. Now I could have traced the block, but that would have taken too long...all I wanted was an overall visual of what this could look like. The actual block for the Wholecloth will be drafted by hand, all I need to do is trace the motif that I took from the EQ7 add on 'Quilting Designs No 8'. Got a bit excited about this as this motif comes with a matching border design. Little bit of mucking around as I had to flip the alternate block and also get the approximate border size happening

Bit hard to see as the image had the motif in a somewhat subdued colour (it printed out fine), but you get the general idea. Here is a photograph of the border design

I so can see this Wholecloth, down to the actual colour...maybe a bit frilly for some but I really like this. The only thing I might have to work on is to make this a bit more stitching friendly...as it is now, the border consists of individual motifs...not sure about that. Also just noticed that I probably should match the size of the centre motif and the border design, so a little bit more fine tuning needs to happen here around sizes and fitting it neatly into the border which will be easy with EQ7 as I can make it any size I want (alternatively might have to look at reducing the centre motif).

But wow, see what one little stencil idea (and motif) can add up to...and this was just one ad hoc idea late at night of how to use the Cindy Needham's Ultimate Shape. I have barely scratched the surface!

Karin