Monday, April 11, 2016

Draco Ostium

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!