My light table

This is my wondrous light table. OK it isn't a pukka light table, it's bigger and better. It my sewing table too. In reality it's a glass garden table (see the hole for the parasol?). I could have found one without the struts across but these had bars along the sides to strengthen the structure and those would have got in the way of my knees whilst sewing. In this photo I have two lamps under it. One with an 18 watt low energy bulb (these are good because you can get higher light levels without the heat) on the floor and one clip on one with an 8 watt bulb to the bottom of the right of the photo.

These photos were taken with my phone so you might need to click on them to see more detail but you can see the feathers quite easily through the paper. They show up even more so when your hand is holding them down.

And an hour or so later, I'd copied it out so I have a full sized half pattern. I laid the wonderful satin I'd bought at the Festival of Quilts over it to see if it would trace through easily and it does!
Yay.

But, it turns out although the satin is supposed to be 60" wide, it's more like 58" and has very wide selvedges so probably has about 54" of usable width. This design is just a little too wide. So I shall go with plan a and use cotton sateen.
Sort of boo but it will look good anyway!

More is more

So I went over the outline with the more intense colour and was about to pin it for quilting when I decided that really it should have more. So now I'm gently shading each lobe of each feather. Thankfully this is far quicker than it looks and I don't have to take breaks of whole days to strip wallpaper.

New feathers

Last night I started designing the 2nd of the quilts I've entered for this year's shows but haven't made yet (gulp).I sat at my desk with a pencil and an eraser and played around until I came up with this. Most of the erasing was done to stop the feathers looking too formal. I find it quite difficult not to make the lobes even like the old feathers.
Once I was happy with it, I went over the pencil with a black pen. I then flipped the paper over (lightweight sketch pad) and copied it onto the back of the sheet. This gave me the mirror image.
The fabric is fine enough to trace through without the use of a lightbox with extra white paper behind the design. The brown lines are a disappearing Clover pen ti give me registration marks.
Whenever I've marked up wholecloths, I've always been a little sad to see the marking disappear. It's a totally different look. So this time the marking is part of the design. The fabric is pale blue and the markings are in teal and deliberately blurred. I shall stitch in teal thread to emphasize the lines.
Once I have this border design marked up, I shall design the centre of the quilt. I'm wondering whether to stick with the teal or change to a different colour for the central motif.

so happy with this new idea

I quilted up last week's feather to take to the talk I gave last Monday. I'm so happy with how this looks. There is no trapunto but it has the same 3D effect.And these are more samples I did yesterday.

poppy finished and Ooh what's this?

I finished the poppy quilt wall hanging for the sitting room on Monday so I could take it with me for the talk, and left it by the front door. I'm pleased with how well it fits in the sitting room.

And this is a little sneak preview of my next quilt.....