Work in Progress: Wholecloth Feather Quilt

I've been working away for a number of hours now on my wholecloth feathers quilt! I've tried not to mention it a whole ton because, you know, everytime I look at it, it's still a wholecloth feathers quilt. I didn't want to bore you with a million blog posts on a white quilt. But I realize that in doing so, I haven't ever shown you the approach I'm taking to tackle such a large quilt!

No time like the present though, right?

Ok, so last time we left off, I was working on the feathers. I'm happy to report that all of the feathers have now been quilted!

I ended up deciding to quilt feathers moving horizontally across the quilt, with denser feathers on the left side, fading into no feathers on the right side.

I started by laying out my quilt sandwich on my bed. Now, we only have a queen size bed, but this will be a king size quilt because we got rid of our bedframe (purging...it's amazing and drastic over here!). I wanted the quilt to drape completely down to the floor, entirely covering the sides of both the extra-thick pillow-top mattress and the box spring.

I'm making it extra large so that even after it's washed and shrinks a bit, it will still be large enough.

Once it looked fairly centered in both directions, I used my washable blue pen to mark the edges of the bed. Every time I needed to do more marking, I could easily line it back up again.

Next, I had to decide exactly where I wanted the feathers to go and how I wanted them to "fade" out. I ended up mentally dividing the bedtop into three sections (not quite thirds, as the middle section is largest). On the left side of the quilt (where it hung off the bed), the feathers would be densest. In the left section, on the top of the bed, the feathers would still be fairly dense, but less so. In the middle section, the feathers would start thinning, and the right section would be left without feathers.

{These feathers are "backwards" from the description, because I took this photo while facing the foot of the bed. So the left side and right side are switched.}

Then I drew spines for the feathers, keeping these divisions in mind. I started by marking the middle feather. Then, I marked the offshoots. I quilted this entire feather. After finishing it, I marked another feather in the same manner alongside of it - so I did not mark the spines of all my feathers at once.

I ended up having just three feathers total, with lots of offshoots, on this quilt (just three was plenty, because of all the offshoots!).

And now, I'm starting to fill in the background with this lovely rectangular meander - although I'm thinking I'll need a lot of coffee to work through it all - there is a lot of negative space in this quilt!!

Linking up to WIP Wednesday

P.S. - This is what happens when you stand on your laundry basket on top of your bed to take photos:

Coolio.