The Welsh Quilting Pattern and Design Handbook... A bit more info

I thought I'd provide a little information about The Welsh Quilting Pattern & Design Handbook that I put together in 1999 for my students. 

It isn't a fancy publication and the one in the picture is well worn.  There are 79 pages of drawings and notes about how different patterns were marked.

This photo show a page where I try to explain how I divide space up, mark the double lines and then divide and mark double line again.  In the Handbook, I used the term 'outlining' for the marking of the second but I think the word 'echo' might better explain how the second line 'echoes' the first.  One of the things you have to decide is which side of the first line you wish to mark the echoing line.  Mark them all the same... for instance, if you have marked the lines that divide the outer border on the outside when you start, mark all the lines the same on the other sides of the design.  But, if you make a mistake, the world won't come to a crashing end.

These pages are about marking motifs and tips for folding paper to make templates.

 

 

These pages show how I divide up border for filling with different patterns.  The left page shows the basic division of the border space and the right page shows the divided area of the border filled with repeating patterns and motifs.

 

The Handbook isn't like a book off the shelf at the quilt shop but it seems to get people started and when you've become good at looking closely to Welsh quilts, it'll help you see how the designs were divided up and the patterns were marked.  

 

May the Welsh quilts capture your imagination.

More Welsh Pattern Marking - Zig-Zag Borders

It's been raining here in Western Washington and it's too cold and dreary to do much of anything outside.  It's good weather to quilt so I've been working on my Welsh wall quilt and it's getting close to completion.

This is where the red quilt is at today.  I have two outer borders and one short border to finish and then I'll be ready to do the folded edge finish.  The finish size will be about 20" x 31".  My favorite part of the design is the zig-zag pattern in the short border.   I first saw it about 15 years ago stitched on a red and white Welsh quilt owned by Jen Jones and I've used it a couple times.  It's a great border pattern to mix with other Welsh patterns.  (There is a basic diagram for marking the zig-zag border in my Handbook on page 47).

To start, I divided the border into sections which is marked with the vertical soap lines.  There were only four because the border is so short. The next step was to mark horizontal lines along each edge of the border (ignore the diagonal lines for a moment).   I used a 1" ruler to mark the horizontal lines, the lines can be marked along the whole length like the lower line, without any breaks in the line or the line can be marked where it crosses the section lines as the line on top shows. 

Now it's time to start dividing the border sections into triangles.  The last photo (above) shows the first diagonal lines which is drawn and the photo below shows the second set of lines. The lines of the diagonal zig-zag  should be parallel.

 

 

The zig-zag is now complete and the lines are outlined on the outside of the zig-zag, not the inside.  The outline was done on the outside because I didn't want to lose any of the design space inside the zig-zag due to the small size of the quilt. The outlining could be done on the inside but make sure it's done the same way on all the borders of the quilt.

 

 

So now, it's time to fill-in the zig-zag.  The vertical lines that fill the zig-zag can free-handed or measured. The good news is that imperfections in marking or stitching don't show up when the design is finished.  I always wash and dry my quilts when finished and the texture of the quilting hides imperfections.

The nice thing about marking with soap and hand quilting is that you aren't stitching fast as with machine quilting.  If a soap mark isn't quite where it looks right, just use it as a guide and quilt where it looks right.

 

I'll show the marking for the little patterns altogether in a later post.

 

Rainy May Day

Back again... I doubt that anyone would ever get the idea that I really enjoy blogging but I do.  I struggle with simply walking downstairs to my sewing room and turning on the laptop.  There are so many distractions and I really struggle with keeping focused now that I have another person bumping around the house when I'm trying to concentrate.  God love him, he's a keeper of a husband but I've always struggled when distracted.  It's time to develop some new coping skills...

I'm not scheduling anymore classes in quilt shops and have just a couple to finish up my existing schedule.  I've actually pieced a quilt top that wasn't a class sample... what a new thing for me to do. 


Pieced from batiks with a flying geese ruler and free-form squares, very quick.  It'll be machine quilted so my non-quilter daughter with cats can enjoy it.

I'm working very short hours at Gee Gees Quilting in Yelm which is about ten miles from home which around here is really close.  I really enjoy keeping my hand in the bigger picture of quilting and being around quilters and as a former teacher of many quiltmaking techniques, I still get to help quilters with their questions. After all, teaching isn't something you can just turn off when it seems to be part of a person's very being.

I've been part of a Tuesday quilt group for years and the blue and white Celtic applique quilt below is a Califonia king, hand appliqued, hand quilted by my quilt group friend, Opal.  It's a stunning quilt.

Below is a picture of a Dear Jane quilt that was finished recently by another group member, Julie.  The quilt is amazing and the pictures really don't do it justice.  The whole quilt was hand pieced and hand quilted.  It's truly beautiful.

The red Welsh quilt sample that I've been working on has been on hold but I plan to do some more marking, quilting and pictures this evening.  If I don't get a new post up in a day or so, please bug me about it.  I could use a poke or a shove once in awhile.  So, please, don't give up on me... I'm hoping for good conditions to hang some of my old quilts out to get pictures of them.  For now, it's raining... normal for here in May.
Enjoy.

Marking Spirals On Welsh Quilts

Spirals patterns are one of my favorite patterns on Welsh quilts.  Spirals may seem to be a very simple, ordinary pattern but like other patterns on Welsh quilts, the magic happens when the spirals get combined with other  patterns into the overall design. 

When I started working with Welsh quilt patterns, it took a while for me to relax and just draw spirals without trying to make them all perfectly round or matched to each other.  In the early 90's, quilting stencils were still in wide use here in the States and American quilting was overly dependent on them.  I had used the stencils but didn't like them because of the limitations of the stencils and this was a big part of my attraction to Welsh patterns... they seemed so free.

Over the years, I've generally marked patterns two ways.  The first was to make my own custom-fit stencil and the second was to just free-hand mark patterns.  In my early years, I mostly used the stencils, partly because it speeded up the marking but still looked like a hand drawn pattern.  When I was teaching workshops, it was much easier for students to adapt to stencils because they also had stencils in their quiltmaking background. 

The basic steps for making a stencil was to draw the design onto template plastic with a black Sharpie pen and then cut along the lines to leave a gap big enough for the fabric marker to get in and mark the pattern.  I used narrow strips of masking tape (on front and back) to bridge the gaps and stiffen the stencil.  Sometimes, I did a whole pattern but often I marked the whole pattern but only cut and taped half of it.  It isn't the way the original Welsh quilt patterns were marked but it works.

These are stencils from an earlier quilt, laid out on the current quilt to show the marked lines and how the gaps are bridged with narrow strips of masking tape to hold it all together.  The stencil would be flipped to mark the other half.

My favorite way to mark patterns is by hand.  I do the dividing of the main parts of the design with rulers but I've come to really enjoy the hand marked patterns which are more consistent with the old quilts. 

In the picture below, part of the patterns were marked with help from stencils and some free-hand.  The spirals were marked free-hand with a little help with the spacing.

The picture below shows how a circle can be divided up for spirals or any other pattern.  I took a sheet of printer paper and cut a basic curve for a quarter circle and then folded the circle into 3 sections from the corner out (the folds barely show in the picture).  The folds are nipped at the ends to help with seeing them and the remaining square corner of the paper is positioned into the center of the circle and the circle border can be divided up for the spirals.

 

 

Now the curved border has been marked using the paper shown above and a ruler was used to finish the marking the spaces.

This picture shows how the spiral was marked with soap but the quilting doesn't have to exactly on the marked line.

 

 

I like patterns that fill the space so when I go to mark a spiral, I often put soap marks where I want the lines to go as is shown in the center of the picture... then I just connect the marks for the spiral.

Another tip for spirals is to know which way you prefer to hand quilt spirals because some quilters have a definite preference.  You can try marking samples of spirals going both directions and see if one direction is better than the other.  If you like clockwise spirals better than counter-clockwise (like the ones above) then it'll save you time to mark them for easier quilting,  The best way is to be able to quilt in any direction with different fingers.

May you have many happy hours quilting spirals.

The Story For Today

I usually re-read my posts and find myself going back and fixing things that don't make sense or are just spelled wrong. I caught a spot on the last post that didn't make sense so hopefully it does now.  As I've read over the first part of what is intended to be my Welsh marking tutorial, I find myself wanting to include so much more information, especially step-by-step sketches like I used to do on a big dry erase board in class.  I think I've got that sorted out now so I can expand a bit more on some of the techniques.

It's been a really busy week which is the way I like it but it's also been such a big news week with the Boston Marathon Bombing and the manhunt. I feel really bad for all the affected victims.  Yesterday was the board meeting for ApParent Project in Haiti and I'm really excited about their jewelry being featured on one of the major morning news shows this week.  They are also preparing to be used in some hunger relief in an area of Haiti that lost crops to severe weather this past year and are hoping that the weather doesn't take out the crops that are coming to maturity at this time.  They intend to buy the food for relief in Haiti rather than buying from outside because it will also help Haitian farmers who struggle to compete with the huge imports of cheaper food from the States.  You can check them out at ApParentProject.org

Today is my art quilt group meeting and I'm really looking forward to it, it's a great group of women and one man... it isn't what most would think of as an art quilt group because it isn't strictly new, innovative techniques.  Over the four years we've met, it has become much more about the encouragement of each person's creativity and oftentimes the pieces that show up are very rooted in the traditional but I think it should be that way.  I've taken Welsh quilts to show because they are the ultimate art quilt to me.

This is Betsy, showing the two pieces on the right.  The piece on the left was a joint project of the whole group a couple years ago.  I drew up the line drawing, cut it into 6' squares and then each person did a small collage in black and white printed papers and then it was repeated in fabric which is what is on the display panel.  It was really beneficial to different people in different ways partly because it was just a small collage of fabric that wasn't big enough to intimidate after doing it the first time on paper.  We'll be doing an exhibit at a library later this year and our group piece will be there.

Tomorrow will be a big day for me too.  I'm going up to train on the cash register at Gee Gee's (my local quilt shop) to be their fill-in part-timer. They won't have to instruct me about their fabric cutting system, I've already got it memoriazed.  I decided to get a part-time job in the shop since my teaching as an independant in the shops has come to an end.  I'm like a border collie, I have to stay busy or I'll get into trouble.

And, last but not least, I have the sample from my last class to finish machine quilting before class on Wednesday.  This shot is of it a couple weeks ago.  I'll show it when it's done this week.  I have pictures in my camera of it but time has run out this morning.  Gotta get in the shower and run into town to meet with the group.

 

May we have peace on Earth.

Marking the Fabric... Just a Series of Decisions

I've chosen my red sateen for the front of my Welsh-inspired quilt and I have a big bold print for the back.  I've chosen a cotton batting with just a bit of polyester for stability.  I've pre-rinsed and dryed my fabrics and the batting got sprayed with water and tossed into the dryer to take the folds out of it and do a bit of gentle pre-shrinking.  If you don't follow the same routine, that's fine by me but I've done it like this for so long that it's just habit.

My red fabric for the quilt top is laid out on my work surface and due to the small size of the sample, it works fine.  If you want to mark a larger top it's much easier to use a larger table... sometimes you can borrow the tables in your local quilt shop to get started with the marking.  The marking process is just a series of choices and the first one is to decide how big the quilt will be.  My sample quilt will be marked 20" by 32" but when the quilting is finished it'll be smaller due to the quilting.  I'll be marking with a soap sliver (don't use a moisurizing soap with oil) which is very temporary so once I've marked the basic lines, I put the front fabric, batting and backing fabrics together and baste right on the lines that are important.  I usually change to another thread color to do the rest of the basting so that I don't get confused over which basting lines are to be quilted.  The soap or chalk works well on dark fabrics but won't on light fabrics.  I've used the rinse-out blue markers for years on light colors and I think the key to using them is to soak the quilt when rinsing rather that just dabbing the marks with water.  More on this later when I take my sample through the finishing up.

To mark the quilt top, think of it this way... decide how big it will be and then divide the area up into borders and center circles... outline as needed and then divide and outline again and fill the created spaces with patterns.  Sounds easy?  Don't worry about doing it all perfect, if you don't risk imperfection, you'll never get any pleasure.  I don't work at perfection, I like the quirky quilts best.  I'll share one of my marking mistakes later....

First of all, I mark vertical and horizontal lines in the center of the quilt.  Usually, I mark temporary lines with a broken line and quilting lines with a solid line but here I marked both center lines with a solid line.  The rulers show how I got the lines square to each other.

Now I'm ready to mark the outside lines of the quilt.  I'll measure out from these center lines to mark the outside lines which will be the outermost line around the quilt design.  There will be 3" borders on all four sides and these will all be outlined from the border side of the line which will show up in a picture when the quilting is being done.  It isn't a big deal which side of the lines the double lines are marked on but they should all be the same.  There will be a 4" border on two of the sides which shows up in the picture below to the left of the marked circles.  The circles in the center are about 12" and 7.5".  I tend to like larger circle designs for the center rather than smaller ones.

This picture shows the all of the lines that do the basic dividing up of the space marked and the layers basted together on the lines.  This isn't the traditional way but a way that I've developed because I'll quilt this in a hoop.  So, the space has been divided into the basic spaces and is ready to mark the double lines which will give definition to the different spaces and keep things from blurring together.

Notice the different color of the fabric?  Same quilt top but it's been turned 90 degrees in this picture and the cotton sateen shows up as a very different color.  Gotta love sateen, it's full of surprises.  So, here's the same top with the dividing lines and double lines quilted.  Notice how the outer quilted lines aren't double at this time.  These will stay this way for the time being.  I've always struggled a bit over what to call the lines that echo the dividing lines... I've referred to them as 'outlining' and 'double lines' but they are just one line echoing another.  It doesn't matter what they're called as long as they get included.  Now the quilt is ready for the patterns to be quilted into the divided spaces but I thought I'd add a bit about how I make templates.

These are some of the tools I use for marking.  The picture below shows how the circle template was made for the center circles.  The funny ruler in the back is a yardstick ruler point fitted to a yardstick and a small hose clamp to hold a Sharpie marker which is what I use on template plastic.   I use this homegrown yardstick compass for big circles.

This is how I make templates for marking.  I mark a quarter or so of the circle.  The inside circle is marked and the line cut away wide enough to allow marking. I place narrow strips of masking tapes across the cut slits (on both sides of the template to make it more stable).  I also have a very small black dot marked where the very center of the circle would be.  I prefer to make the template a little larger and mark the center where I can see it better to center it with the lines on the fabric.

So, in the next post, I'll show how the circle is divided up to be filled with spirals,  also known as Welsh 'snails'... stay tuned.

A Little Trick For Burying Hand Quilting Knots

Cotton sateen is my favorite fabric for handquilting and a solution to one of it's quirks has developed so I thought I'd see if it works for other quilters also.

This picture shows the texture of cotton sateen.

Quilting on sateen creates lusious texture on finished quilts and some quilters describe quilting through it as like "quilting through butter".  Now, I can assure you that it's very nice to quilt on but like butter?  I've never been able to quite figure out that word picture... but after years of quilting, one quirk that has always stood out as a nuisance is burying the knots properly.

When it's time to end a line of stitching, I make a small knot right against the surface of the quilt and then I pull on the thread gently to pull the knot out of the way and I attempt to stick the needle in the same opening created by the knotted thread as it comes up out of the fabic.  If all goes well, the needle slides between the layers of the quilt and is pulled back up through the quilt top fabric and with a gentle tug, the knot slips through the tiny opening made by the needle and thread and disapears inside the quilt layers.  The needle gets pushed  back up through the fabric nearby and the thread gets clipped... any remaining tail is pulled back between the layers or helped along by the point of the needle.

But, sometimes the knot burying doesn't go so well... the needle didn't quite get in the right little opening and the knot hangs up on an unseen thread and won't pop under the fabric.  The knot has to be carefully poked and prodded with the needle to pull it back up to try again.  Now it's possible I'm the only person this happens to or maybe it's the way I bury my knots... whatever, but it's really frustrating. 

The other night I was quilting on the red sample piece that I'm using for the tutorials and I spent about 20 minutes trying to get a knot back up so I could start over (this was a new world's record for me).  I was'nt able to get the knot up and out of the little hole but it wouldn't bury either... it was hung up on those little sateen fibers and the more I dug away at it, the more little threads of sateen I was causing damage to.  So, my little razor-sharp brain went to work and figured out a solution which is really simple. 

Now when I go to insert the needle to bury a knot, I do everything the same but just before pulling on the needle to pop the knot into the quilt, I take a piece of waste thread a couple inches long and I stick it through the loop of the thread that is being pulled down through the layers.  Now, as I pull on the thread, I can see the knot disappear into batting and I can pull the waste thread out and keep going.  But, if the thread won't pop down into the quilt, I can use the waste thread to gently pull the knot back up and do it again... no damage to the sateen.  It works, I've been using the technique for a couple days and while it takes a little longer, it has actually saved me time.  But more important than that, it's really reduced my frustration level.  I'm enjoying the quilting more and I don't have to have magnifying glasses and a bright light to see to bury those pesky knots. 

A great help to those of us with 'mature' eyes.

A sateen quilt at Beamish Museum, it appears to be different colors but it's all because of the way sateen reflects light when it's cut and turned 90 degrees.  The difference here is the result of the camera flash and the angle of the camera to the quilt.  For best results taking pictures of sateen quilts, shoot them almost straight on and if possible, without a flash.  Taken during a visit to N. England in 1997.

Happy quilting.