Work in Progress Wednesday, a bit late

I’m nearing the end of Thursday here, so I am running a bit late as far as work in progress Wednesday. I’ve done most of the bare-bones structural quilting on my Rattlesnake quilt — major lines stitched just outside the ditch, dividing most of the major quilting areas and hopefully giving the quilt stability so I can focus on what I want to do in each section. As I mentioned a few posts ago, I’ve been inspired by Carol Ann Waugh’s Stupendous Stitching, and I want to use some of her techniques in the quilt. I took her Craftsy course by the same name, and I am also planning to make a smaller wall hanging applying her ideas. For the rattlesnake, however, I am settling for inspiration rather than systematically applying her technique as introduced in the class. I’ll talk a bit more about what I am and am not using and why in a future post.

One step I did take, somewhat modified from her directions, was to use most of the decorative stitches my machine can do on a stitch sampler. I found a few fabrics I am unlikely to use in future quilts and used one of my ‘what was I thinking’ fabrics for backing and tried stitch after stitch, playing with stitch width and length as I went along so I could get a sense of what was possible. Carol Ann Waugh’s stupendous stitching is done as embroidery and later sandwiched and backed. Because for the Rattlesnake quilt, I will be using the stitches on a sandwiched quilt, that’s how I did my stitch samples.

Here’s what I have so far:

It’s quite interesting to try the different stitches. Some of the ones that look great on the card just don’t work in the sample. Others were a lot more appealing than I anticipated. I started to figure out which types of stitches could be modified for different looks and which are really best left in the default setting. Next step is to try some of these stitches out on my quilt. Somehow, based on those samples, I am going to create something that includes bits that look something like this: