Blog | DreamWeaver’s Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog

Absenteeism and Admissions

1. January 2010

I’m just popping in to say hey, and sorry for my absenteeism. Actually, “absenteeism” isn’t really a very accurate term either. “Totally and inexcusably lazy slacker” when it comes to anything I should be doing would be more to the point to be completely honest. I’ve had a sickness since, oh, along about Christmas Eve or so. I don’t want to eat or sleep, I haven’t read blogs (since long before that actually), haven’t posted anything myself, my email inbox is crowded with over 100 emails (it’s been down under 30-40 for months up until now), I haven’t done anything remotely related to quilting and think only of XP, gold, spells and quests. I have managed to feed my family the requisite Christmas goodies and meals at least, but other than these two huge must-dos, I have been completely out of touch with reality as it has been for the last few years.

A New Appreciation

15. December 2009

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My current project is sorely taxing my creativity and definitely making me question my otherwise good judgment. ITMan and I will be married 20 years on December 28, and I have something very special planned as a gift for both of us, but it’s not exactly something that fits in a box and is easy to wrap. (And no, I’m not telling what it is yet just in case he decides to do something completely out of character all of a sudden and read my blog!)

I wanted to make a small scrapbook-type presentation for this gift so that I could give it to him a few days before. For this particular gift, he does need a little bit of advance warning, and I didn’t want to just tell him about it. So I went searching for a handmade journal or small scrapbook thing online and could only come up with one thing that really spoke to me and it was a whopping $160! Um. No. Beside the cost, it was a full journal with 50 pages and all I really needed was about a dozen, if that. I don’t want to write a novel, after all!

The Problem with Precuts

13. December 2009

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If you follow me on Twitter, you may have already seen a bit of grousing on this subject, but I have to elaborate further here. You see, I had this sort of half formed plan (I won’t say half-baked, since that implies that it’s done but unsuccessful; this plan was just in it’s infancy) for a show quilt incorporating scrappy batiks, Inchies and machine embroidery. Don’t ask me to tell you how that was going to turn out with all of those seemingly disparate elements because I hadn’t yet figured that out completely, but it’s a moot point now anyway as you’ll see despite the fact that the Bali Pops look so pretty:

While the plan was still forming though, I spent a lot of time searching around the Internet looking for the best price on Hoffman Bali Pops, and was really happy when a 20% off coupon from Fat Quarter Shop showed up in my inbox at just the right moment.

Head to Head: EQ Printables vs. Jacquard Cotton Sheets

5. December 2009

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I’ve been doing some printing on fabric off and on lately, using EQ Printables Premium Cotton Satin Inkjet Fabric Sheets. I picked up a 6 sheet package at Quilt Market in Houston in 2008 so that I could try it out. The results with the EQ Printables are okay, but I haven’t been ecstatically happy with them, so when I was ordering from SoftExpressions.com recently, I decided to order a package of Jacquard Cotton Ink Jet Printing Sheets to see if it was any better.

I actually wasn’t planning on doing any sort of really scientific side-by-side comparison when I ordered the Jacquard, but after I printed an image on the EQ Printables and was pretty unhappy with the way the ink ran and spread during the rinsing phase, I decided to print the same image on the Jacquard to test it out. And okay, it’s still not a terribly thorough analysis since it’s not like I’m going to burn through three or four more sheets to test different kinds of images on each of these brands, but I think the results are worth sharing anyway.

Here’s the head to head, brutal comparison: