First I had to decide on how I wanted the background of the Rhino to look. By that I mean the quilting… it will be done in orange, the same colour as the background fabric.

It's an incredibly detailed quilt, so the quilting needs to compliment it…

I don't want to do horizontal lines.

I'm not going to do feathers.. I wonder if the person who designed that pattern so many years ago could imagine that millions of quilters would follow her idea.?

No stippling.

No swirling…. it has to be my pattern.

It needs to be a similar shape to the rhino, it has to be delicate, it has to be subtle.

 
So I did a few sketches over breaky.

I decided on a 3" repeat….. 4 repeats, to make a 6" block that could be reversed and it needs to intertwine.

It's a tall order. this is just 1/4 of the block, so effectively, the lines need to match exactly when you put 4 of these images together….

I made a 3" design on velum, photocopied it and the four images  together… It looked OK, so I copied it into EQ6 and re-drew it roughly. That gave me an idea of how it was going to look as a n overall design.
I played around with it for an hour or so, twisting and turning the blocks until I was happy.

4 three inch blocks, make a 6" block and 4 six inch blocks make the pattern.
DONE. Then I slept for half an hour.

I've tried transferring it to fabric 3 different ways… 

1. with washout pen…. it was too thick and although it will stay there when I'm handling the quilt under the machine it looked terrible.

2. white pen. Nup, can't see it and I think it will wear off with handling.

3. lead pencil, pencil was too hard and caught on the fabric.

4. Inktense outliner pencil, it's softer and will rub out….works OK.

5. I've tried a white roll on pen that disappears when you iron it, not bad, but I don't think Ill use it.

6. Colored pencil that I can rub out after it's been quilted.

That's it…I joined a lot of the patterns together to get the correct size for the quilts…