Wednesday 26 September 2007

Wholecloth and Ostrich quilt

The dreadful wholecloth. As I've said before, I don't know why I bothered except it was good practice doing grid work. This is a preprinted Bernatex wholecloth and is very badly conceived. Why? Many reasons but a few are, there is not enough difference in scale between the grid and the designs, the centre portion is not framed or isolated in any why to give it prominence, ditto for the middle ring of ribbons ands flowers and then there is proportionately too little quilting in the outer border. This quilt despite it's creases looks far better in the carefully taken photo than it does in reality. (creases come from DH sitting on it (grin).) And that's without the problems of the gird work crossing single lines of flower stems.
You might guess by now that I'm not impressed....
This is DD's 2006 Ostrich quilt hanging where it was created for. The fabrics are almost all from Ikea in their Rosali range. It is rumored that these were designed by Cath Kidston or they might have been a rip off copy. Ikea didn't sell them for very long, they were dirt cheap and absolutely gorgeous and now sell for about 5 times their original price on Ebay. Unfortunately DH was with me the day I bought them so I was far more restrained than I should have been and I had to supplement it with some at the outrageous Ebay prices.

7 comments:

  1. I like your Ostrich...it's picture perfect in that room!

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  2. You're right about that wholecloth, it leaves me cold. I am very impressed you finished it. I don't think I would have.

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  3. Hey the wholecloth is not soemthing you are going to win rave reviews on but............you did a great job with the pattern as it was. The crosshatching looks just great. Now design your own and use everything you learned and I bet you will have an awesome quilt!

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  4. what a shame with that wholecloth - all that work for such an uninspiring design - just goes to show you should stick to doing your own designs - far superior!

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  5. I'm not sure I would have had the patience to finish the wholecloth, so give yourself a gold star for that alone. It looks good, but not as good as your designs - I think, as you said in your blog, it's the lack of a middle that I miss the most. The Peacock hanging is perfect in that room - which is a very pretty room btw. The Wittering Rainbow

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  6. I am dreaming or did you go on to colour this wholecloth? I just thought about it because I was browsing the cotton patch website and saw a similar one on there.

    http://www.cottonpatch.co.uk/acatalog/Wholecloth_Quilt_Tops.html

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  7. You're right and at the Ardingly Show one other person had coloured it with thread work on her machine and yet another hand quilted it in coloured threads.

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