Background beginnings

I had a few available hours today, so I dove in and made a start on the background. The basic outlines are now in place. Tomorrow I finish it off!

This was the fourth month of SewCalGal’s 2012 Free-Motion Quilting Challenge. This month guest teacher was Don Linn. He introduced a method of tracing your design onto tulle or netting with a permanent marker, and then using the marked tulle to trace the design onto your quilt with a washable blue marker. Since I was working on a deadline for this project, I used it for my April challenge. I modified Don’s the method slightly, however. I traced my background design onto Sulky’s Solvy water soluble stabilizer, which is a translucent, mesh-like material. I pinned the Solvy to my quilt top and stitched my major motifs right through the stabilizer. Then I was able to gently tear away the Solvy, leaving my quilting lines behind. In this instance, I was able to remove all of the Solvy just by carefully tearing it away, but if I had areas I could not remove, I could have dissolved it with water to remove all remaining bits. In any case, I think the modified method which I used fulfills the main lesson that Don was trying to teach, which was “to use the [tracing] technique to create a stencil” and then to “use free-motion quilting to stitch along the marked lines.”

If you would like to see the finished quilt, you can see it on the April 26 entry.

Here is a close-up.