I belong to the Calgary Long-Arm Quilting Group - not really a guild, but a growing group of people who do long-arm quilting - some for just their own quilts and some who also quilt for others. We decided to do a wholecloth quilt group entry into the annual Heritage Park Festival of Quilts. So I signed up and spent a bit of time figuring out what I wanted to do and then how to do it (described at the bottom of the pix). Here is my resulting contribution to our group entry: Draco Ostium, which is the Latin for Dragon Door.
I didn't want to do a "traditional" wholecloth. I was thinking dragons - we've been watching too many "period" TV where dragons are featured in tapestries, etc. I found a black and white clip art illustration, imported it to EQ7, traced it in EQ7 then printed it out to the size I needed. The thing I like about EQ7 is that once the drawing is done it can be printed to any size and it will automatically tile the printout for 8.5*11" paper. The final size of the wall hanging is 26" * 40".
That was the "easy" part. Then I had to figure out how to mark it onto black fabric. In the end I bought some white "carbon" paper. Of course it's not actually carbon, but some sort of white chalk. I used that to trace the design onto the fabric. Because it was chalk it would not last long once I started working with it so the first thing I did once I had it mounted on the frame was to do one stitch line over the entire design. That became my outline. From there I stitched over the outlines 4-5 times in gold. Then I did the background in "mahogany" Glide thread (which is what I use on almost all of my quilting - it runs really well in my machine). The background is a variety of micro sized fillers - pebbles, matchstick, and swirls.
I was going for a sort of old leather or wood look and I'm really happy with the way it turned out!
