*If any of you have admired the quilting on a wholecloth quilt at a quilt show, there's nothing 'plain' about it!!!"One of the earliest quilt styles is the wholecloth quilt. It is predominantly made of a single fabric. The actual quilting is quite plain*. Parallel and crossed lines travel through peonies, peacocks, and pomegranates. Crosshatching, diamonds, basket weaves - all stitched on point - and elongated shells, chevrons, and herringbone patterns appear throughout this (early nineteenth century) period".
My most favorite style of wholecloth starts as a vintage linen. I've collected a few...
When you're ready to begin and after choosing your linen, you audition patterns, to include stencils and rulers. Then you transfer the pattern using either a water-soluble or air-soluble marking pen. Then quilt! Pictured are a couple of wholecloth quilts - that started as vintage linens - I finished over the Christmas holiday season. Since quilting them takes time, I usually don't have time during the year when I'm working on customer quilts to finish them. So, it was a gift to myself to have two completed!
The only original embellishment to this linen was a square of embroidered flowers and leaves. Very sweet but very one-dimensional. To breathe life into it, making it three-dimesional, I added everything else.
The intense micro-stippling popped out the designs. It also took a LOT of time to do!
The second vintage linen began with four appliquéd and embroidered corners of flowers and leaves:
Below you can see the border treatment, which is basically piano-keys with a radiating effect on the corners.
A close-up of the quilted tulips winding around the center cross-hatching, as well as "McTavishing", a type of background fill:
I attribute both Cindy Needham's Wholecloth Linen Quilts and Karen McTavish's Whitework Quilting as inspiration on quilting designs and recommend them highly.
Off to another vintage linen!
