Sunday
April 30th
2006

The tiniest stippling ever!

Here’s where I’m at on the king size quilt:

Tiny Stipples

Well, it may not be the tiniest ever, but it’s a first for me! Okay, so now you all know just how deep the insanity really goes. It’s one of those things that had to be done, though; the monogram letters are so delicate that the size of the background stipple quilting had to be really, really small. That’s a rule to keep in mind: to be effective, the size of the background quilting must be smaller than the smallest element of the foreground design. If the stippling around the monograms was larger (like the size outside the circle), the monograms wouldn’t have shown up as well. When I was designing the quilting for this quilt, I knew I didn’t want to have to quilt stipples that small across the whole quilt. Can you imagine? Eeek! That’s why I added the circular border around the monograms, so I could quilt tiny stipples just on that part of the quilt, and the rest could be more moderately sized (relatively). For an even closer view:

Tiny Stipples Detail

Remember that the foreground quilting is done with 50wt cotton thread, and the stippling is #100 silk. Stippling this small would probably not look as nice in cotton. Use a very fine needle (like a size 8 ) when quilting with silk.