My friend, Debbie, finished piecing our show quilt and I have labored over the quilting design and I finally have one that I like. So I loaded it, did the top border (piano keys and surrounding feathers) and got stuck. When I drew the design on paper, I didn’t think about the tool(s) that would be used to make the long low arch from one corner of the design to the other. Hmmmm.
Well, it is actually 4 long low arches on each side, so 16 low long low arches. It eventually joins up and makes a cool diamond. But the arch is like 30” long. I drew half of it on paper using a light box. Then I made a stencil for the half arch from the drawing.
I dusted the quilt stencil with chalk. Alas, the quilt is so light that the white chalk does not show. I tried poking my blue marker through the stencil holes. Tedious, nevermind that I was afraid that pulling the pen out of the stencil would pull the tip off the blue pen and have ink all over the quilt. DRAT.
So I chose a very low tech solution. I had just bought a new computer desk and had the box in the garage. So I dusted the stencil on the cardboard and then drew a pencil line for the innermost line in the arch. I cut the cardboard at the first arch and used it to draw the arch first line on the quilt using purple (fade-away) pen. That worked great. With the first arch in place, then I could just use a ruler and my hopping foot to quilt the other 3 lines.
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