Budget pressing tool

A recent post by Jennifer Houlden here led me to post the following. Don't get me wrong - I love-love-love Clover tools. But if you don't have one, or are on a tight budget, here's an alternative:

I've sanded the pressing surfaces at left and right to make them extra smooth. Not an original idea - it came from a guild speaker. Thank you, whoever you were!

Can you mail an elephant?

That was the subject line of an email I sent when I needed to get this quilt back. It's part of "Celebrate the Day with Quilts - An Art Quilt Challenge" by Shannon Shirley. My quilt is one of 72 in the book - six quilts per month celebrating some of the well- and lesser-known holidays on the calendar. It was included at Quiltfest Destination Savannah last month, and will also hang at The NQA show in Columbus, OH, and the PA National Quilt Exposition in September. For more dates see Once in a Rabbit Moon.

My Guest Blogger - Nan Baker

This week brings a new wrinkle to this blog - a guest blogger. Please enjoy the post, and learn more about her at the end. Thanks for writing, Nan!

Color Your World by Nan Baker

One of the most exciting things about starting school was getting a new box of crayons. Opening the box and seeing all those gorgeous colors was such a treat. I could hardly wait to use them.
Now I will admit, I much preferred a coloring book (and yes I colored inside the lines) instead of a blank sheet of paper. In fact, a blank sheet of paper absolutely scared me to death. What would I put on it? I needed lines and I felt safe when I had them. (I still do to this day – I use graph paper.)
It was always fun to pick out my favorite colors with the crayons. I would go towards the yellows, oranges (fall colors and they are still my favorites today). Isn't it interesting how a little box of crayons can say so much about how colors will play in your life? At least that is the way it has been for me.
As quilters, colors play such an important part, yet they can be very intimidating. Now I will admit, I am not an art major, but I do have an eye for color. At least that is what I have been told over and over by some art majors. Yet even with an eye for color, it is still sometimes very difficult to pick out those "purrfect" colors for a quilt.
There are some wonderful books on the subject and I have several. One is by Maria Peagler called Color Mastery:10 Principles for Creating Stunning Quilts and another is Color Confidence for Quilters by Jinny Beyer. These books have proved to be very helpful in understanding and choosing colors.
I also have a color wheel which has proved to be very beneficial.
However, I must admit that sometimes I see a piece of fabric and it just calls my name. That happened to me when I was making my first pair of drapes for my new home. I walked in the shop and on one of the front rows – there it was! I looked no further – I knew I had to have it. Those drapes hung in two houses and I never grew tired of them. I even kept some leftover fabric and made a quilt. I pulled colors from the fabric that coordinated and I am pleased with the results. The pattern is from 9-Patch Pizzazz by Judy Sisneros.
Now I have another small piece of fabric - not even a FQ - and the colors just make me happy. I don't even know where this fabric came from. It was a scrap in my stash. Since I don't have enough for a quilt, I am going to pull colors from it that will coordinate to create my masterpiece. I don't even have a design in mind, but I know these colors will work beautifully together as they do so in the lovely fabric.
Again I am not an expert, but when you can't decide what colors to use in a quilt, consult a book or two for some basics and guidelines. If you are still not sure, find a piece of fabric that you like and pull from the colors there to help create your work of art.
Then if you are still not satisfied and can't find the right fabric, check with Lisa as she just may have what you need. Thank you Lisa for letting me be a Guest Blogger. I am pleased and honored.

---

Nan Baker is the CEO and Designer for Purrfect Spots, a company where quilts, needlework and animals are loved. Her designs have appeared in numerous publications including The Quilt Pattern Magazine, Quiltmaker's 100 Blocks, QuiltsandCreativity.com and on QNNtv.com. Visit her website at www.purrfectspots.com and her blog at www.purrfectspots.blogspot.com. Nan is also the Marketing Director for The Quilt Pattern Magazine.

Sampling PFDs

Thursday, January 2, I got samples of 15 fabrics from Robert Kaufman. I added some other white/PFD fabrics I had on hand and dyed all of them in a single 10% OWG dye bath. the results are above, sorted with the darkest results at the bottom left and worst on the upper right. I have added the Kaufman white fabrics to my website, plus color choices of Kona®, Radiance and Utra Sateen if you want to order a bolt.

The left column starts with 400M and 419M from Testfabrics at the top. I scoured samples of everything, including those two, and they are on the left of each pair. These came pretty dark, but weren’t the darkest. Hampton Twill is next, then Essex (55% Linen/45% Cotton), then Organic Wide (57”-58”), then Ibiza Stretch Twill. The latter came out the darkest, and contains 3% spandex. It’s basically stretch denim and weighs 7.3 oz/sq yd.

The middle column starts with Ultra Sateen, which is not PFD, but dyes beautifully. Not a big winner in this experiment, but is great for other uses, like LWI and dye painting. And it comes in 11 other colors, too! Next is Organic Voile – 100% cotton and great for shibori and vat dyeing, as it’s very sheer. There’s only one sample here – I left the scoured one in the washer. Brussels Washer is  55% Linen, 45% Rayon and looks like linen; I thought the color shifted a little towards the red in this sample.  Pimatex and Patina are the next two, and Kona is at the bottom of the column. It also comes in another 270 colors!

The right column includes Organic Poplin, Pure Threads Dyer’s Cloth from James Thompson Co, Cambridge Lawn, 21-Wale Corduroy, which is from an old lot but is still available. Then there’s Laguna Jersey, Kona 60 and ‘Cherrywood’ muslin. The muslin samples were both prewashed; the one on the left also went through the scour cycle with the others. The muslin is on the website too, by the yard.

The far right are some miscellaneous fabrics, as follows:
Radiance - the silk side is showing. All the dye sites were filled with red first so that’s why there’s such a color shift.
Breezy Wide and the Seersucker are both polyester-cotton blends – Breezy is 65% polyester, the Seersucker is 45% polyester. It does give a nice light color, and it’s a fabric I love in warm weather. (What’s that?) The Stretch PIn-wale Pique is 96% cotton, but it’s no longer available. Oh – the seersucker is back in stock at Kaufman since I added text to the photo – just ignore the ‘NA’.  

As of this writing, 2/9, the Laguna Jersey is no longer on the Kaufman site. One fabric that I didn’t test is a bleached white muslin from Robert Kaufman, and there are dozens more – for next time! I hope you’ll see something you’d like to try – just click on the links to shop.

From spoiled to productive

OK, my sister spoils me at Christmas every year, and I’m so thankful. Last year she gave me a check to use towards the dye painting class I took at Pro Chem. This year I am going to skip going to a class and start saving for 2015, and my sister got me a load of surface design books – Dyes & Paints by Elin Noble, Screen Printing by Benn & Morgan, Finding Your Own Visual Language by Dunnewold, Benn & Morgan and Color by Design by Ann Johnston. And my niece gave me a gift certificate to Dharma Trading , so I can add to that list of books, or buy garments to dye/discharge/do design work on. Decisions, decisions.

So I have been working on some of the exercises from ‘Visual Language’ and have created a hand-painted stencil  to use with a silk screen. Here’s a picture of the first three prints I pulled through it.

And this is a detail of the first print I pulled, showing the moiré effect created by printing through two layers of sheer cloth. That alone is an exciting discovery, I think.

A few prints

Most of these are monoprints, and one is a screen print from a screen made with polyester mesh and house paint. The latter is a new technique for me, but it seems to have a lot of possibility. Now I just need to make up some more frames.

This is a monoprint with several varieties of “black.” The colors all started with some black dye mixed at 5% and thickened. That’s not really strong enough to get a good print. The grey is  mixed with 1% black dye. Then I added tangerine to one cup, and orange and blue to another. A third cup I added blue only to – a very nice blue-grey was the result.

This is the blue-grey, with ‘telephone dials’ that are the result of dropping a metal palette into the dye. The first time I did that was by mistake and I liked the pattern a lot.

The first of these two pictures is a monoprint using the various different blacks I had mixed up. The second is a ghost print with some more dye added, I think.

This was a mixture of all the leftover blacks, with areas of color removed using a small sea sponge.

This was made with stronger black dye using the screen I made with house paint. It was inspired by the print from the palette. A lot of the rough areas could get tidied up. Maybe I will just make the circles crisper, though.

Home again, and some news

Last night I spoke at the meeting of the Berry Basket Quilters in Medford, NJ. My usual speaking engagement is a trunk show, starting with some early quilts, and ending with the latest quilt in the works, with lots of hand-dyed fabric in between. It was fun, because I can always talk dyeing!

My friend Karin is in the guild, and I stayed the night with her, and we talked quilting, fabric and dyeing most of the time we were awake. I also spoke about my business and the recent craft show experience. One goal with a real deadline was applying for state-wide juried status with the Pennsylvania Guild of Craftsmen. So, the deadline is tomorrow, November 15, and I got my submission done today! And, by the way, I have already been juried at the Lehigh Valley Chapter level.
One of the quilts I am submitting for jurying is not currently in my hands. It is with Shannon Shirley, and it is going to be included in an upcoming book to be published by Schiffer Publishing. But if I am selected for the jurying session (no guarantees) I'll be able to get the quilt here in time. And the really cool part is that Shannon told me it will be included in the exhibit at the upcoming Quiltfest Destination Savannah in the end of March, 2014. Keep your eyes open for it, and I'll post a picture of it on this site when the exhibit is unveiled.