After having signed up with Nancy Chong's Celtic knotwork class at Quilt University, I've ordered a few books, how to "draw your own Celtic designs". Last evening I started experimenting with some practice designs of my own and I wanted to share the process with you.
Here I'm working with a 7x7 block grid. The red marks tell me where the grid will be interrupted and the light pencil markings are the beginning of the knotwork. (You'll see an oops in the picture here, where I didn't highlight one of my "stop marks")
In the next pictures you see how I'm working my way out of the center.
With some lines I stop to take a moment to see where the lines will lead me.
And then I can continue to close the lines. By now this looks pretty confusing, don't you think?
To make the visualization easier on me I decided to use different color highlighters. Later on, if I decide to turn this into an actual project I can use different colors of fabric in place of the different colors of highlighter that I used, or make the design all in one color, but I think different colors make the projects more interesting.
Here you see more clearly that some parts of the design are continuous and others (although continuous in themselves) are not continuous throughout the entire design.
Now it's time to fill some of the empty spaces, shown with the orange highlighter - and you probably can see that something's still missing.
So to balance the design out, I mirror image the orange line and fill the rest of the design in with the yellow highlighter.
Voila! This is the finished design doodle. I think this design, once worked out in a larger scale would make a nice table topper or wallhanging. Maybe you'll see this as a finished project in the future on my blog. ;o)
So this is how the Celtic applique looks finished. The third and last lesson was loaded today about how to finish the table runner. Instead on working on finishing this I spent this morning with redrafting my doodle from the other day into a workable pattern.
The final size of this comes out to be about 18 1/2" for the design itself. At first I thought I could work it to be a 40" wall hanging, but the proportions of the bias would be off. One option I'd have to bring it up to 40" is to use double lines and fill the areas between them with different colored fabric from the main background to give it a stained glass effect. Definitely something worth looking into. ;o)
