Springtime Melody #1

I love making whole cloth miniature quilts from silk fabric.  The sheen on the silk when the design is quilted accentuates the designs and besides that the fabric is just so pretty.  Recently I found out that our local Joann fabric store had a few pieces of 100% silk so I purchased several 1/2 yard cuts and chose a spring green color for my next project but first needed to draft the design.  Since I knew that I wanted a central design surrounded by borders all stitched in a contrasting thread I started on the middle area.   I worked on designing 1/4 of the center and after drawing, erasing, and re-drawing I got something I liked.  I then scanned the design and used Photoshop Elements 11  on my computer to set the four quarters of the design to make it whole. I printed off the design and worked on drawing up border design ideas.  I know if I would have drawn this design on the computer in one of the computer aided drawing programs I could have had a more perfectly drawn design but I do love to work with pencil/pens and paper so opted to hand draw my design.  It doesn’t look like a design that can be embroidered with one of the fancy embroidery machines since it does have it’s irregularities and I certainly don't want viewers to think I just used an embroidery machine to stitch out my design after all the work I put into drawing and stitching it.

 

At this point I thought I was done with my design that measured about 8” square.The more I looked at it the more I thought it needed a bit more in the blank spaces so took half of the central design and snugged those designs up against the outside border.  Now I like it and there are still areas for background quilting to make the designs stand out.Next up – transferring the design and the most fun part, the machine quilting.

Until Later,
Lynn
Please remember these are my photos and my design so do not “borrow” them for your own use.

Working On My Design

The last few days I have been thinking about how I want to set the appliqued basket block I did for myself. Yesterday I sat down at the computer and played with several ideas on EQ6. Nothing came together or felt right until I got the idea to put appliqued swags around the oval border.

Since the original block was a circle and I just elongated it in EQ6 ,it changed the dimension so that the divisions on the original circle are not all the same size now. I had thought I could divide up the points and make my swags to fit and they would be equal in size - wrong! I don't know enough math to know if there is some way to do this so had to put my thinking cap on.

I looked up how to find the circumference of oval or ellipse on Google and did find some sort of calculator that you put your information into but it didn't come up with anything close to the size. The problem is that an oval can be wider or taller and it affects the circumference.

To solve my problem I finally took a flexible ruler and laid the edge on the curve on my print out and slowly measured 1/4 of the oval then used my calculator to figure what the dimensions would be if I put 3 swags in each quarter - think it will work as I have printed out swags the size I need and fitted them up to my paper oval.

This afternoon I am hoping I can figure out what fabrics I want to use for the different borders and get the oval done so I can start on the swags.

This morning I only worked on the quilt design until 9:00 am then started mowing the lawn and the rest of the yard. It takes me about 4 hours to get it all done with the riding mower. When you live on a farm you end up mowing a lot of area to keep everything looking neat so it just takes a while. If I only had the lawn to do that would be a snap. Am always glad when I am done as everything looks so good for a week then I have to do it all over again.

Until later,
Lynn