I’m working on a project right now that requires some fabric printing, so I got out the bottles of Bubble Jet Set 2000 and Bubble Jet Rinse this morning. I’ve had fairly good luck with this type of thing in the past, but I always dread going down this road because it’s kind of a PITA to mess with it all, so it’s been sitting here waiting for me to get motivated for a few days. I got to thinking today about why it feels like such a pain, and I guess the biggest thing is the soaking fabric/liquid mess to deal with.

First it’s drag all the bottles and fabric to the kitchen, and dig up a pan that’s big enough. The fabric is supposed to be soaked flat in the pan, so a fairly large pan is necessary since it’s likely that you’ll end up printing on a regular 8½ x 11″ sheet that fits in the printer. I don’t really have a pan that’s that big with tall enough sides that I’m not going to slop the liquid all over when it’s time to pour it back into the bottle, so I end up using something smaller and folding the fabric in half for soaking.

After soaking, then I have to find somewhere and somehow to drain the fabric off a bit until it’s not too drippy, and I usually just stand there and hold it above the pan with tongs until I feel like I can spread it out on a couple of paper towels to dry without making a total mess all over. The leftover solution can be reused, so then it’s time to get a funnel out and try pouring it back in the bottle without dribbling it everywhere off the side of the pan, which is usually only moderately successful. The pan and tongs and funnel then need to be run through the dishwasher so that they’ll be safe for food use once again.

Even after all that, there’s still the rest of the process to tackle: once the fabric is dry, it has to be ironed to freezer paper and trimmed to pinter size. When I run it through my HP photosmart 1215 printer, I set it for thick paper, brochure or cardstock, set the print quality to “Best” and crank the ink volume up to maximum to get a really good print. I do find that ironing from the freezer paper side one last time on high heat after trimming is a good last step; the paper/fabric page curls a bit toward the freezer paper side, which works nicely with my printer to prevent page jams and smudged printing. If I’ve ironed carefully and well enough, the fabric/freezer paper page doesn’t get stuck in the printer with ink smeared all over, and I don’t have to start fresh from the beginning! The actual printing process is pretty easy though, after I get through the soaking mess to get started.

I do know about the pretreated fabric you can buy to print on, but friends of mine have had bad luck with scorching and disintegration of the fabric when using it, and if you want to use a certain fabric that’s in your project, or something other than white or cream, you’re out of luck. I’ve never needed to do this fabric printing thing on just any old white or cream fabric, so I’ve always used the Bubble Jet Set method.

So here’s what I really want: I want a flat pan that’s at least 10″ x 12″, with 2″ sides, a dripless pouring spout in one corner, some type of stand thing or tray thing that lifts up out of the solution but is self-supporting for draining/drying the fabric, with a set of tongs to match. Oh, and it needs a lid too, so that it can all be kept together and neat when not in use. Yes, I know, it’s a tall order, but anybody got a line on something like that? Failing that, any suggestions for making this process easier?

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…and in here. I think summer must get to everyone. Some of the blogs I read have gone quiet, or a bit slower anyway, and now it’s hit here too. It’s just too hot most days to be motivated to do much of anything! Adding in all the rest of the Life stuff means my productivity is taking a huge hit at the moment. I think I’ve composed quite a few posts in my head in the last week or so, none of which actually made it to a screen near you, and the rest of my quilting life is in no better shape!

I have been working on Inchies, slowly but surely, and I did make it to the Arts & Crafts store twice in two weeks, looking for fabric for the background quilt for the Inchies (it doesn’t hurt that the car is the only air conditioned place in my life right now). During one trip, there was a nice quilter in the shop who wanted to try hand quilting, and was looking for some hand quilting thread. The shop doesn’t even have any. How can you be a brick and mortar store that stocks quilting supplies without having even basic hand quilting thread of some kind in white and beige?

This quilter wasn’t getting much help from the sales person, who admitted she did everything by machine, so the quilter asked me what I thought about using any of the other threads they have in the store for hand quilting. I didn’t really have a clear answer for her on that one. I’ve never hand quilted with thread that wasn’t made for the purpose. I did remember that machine sewing thread is made with an opposite twist direction than hand sewing thread, since the machine will twist the thread further as it sews, which will increase the twist in a machine thread, but cause a hand sewing thread to untwist and eventually weaken and break.

I’m not sure if using a machine thread for hand work would do the same type of thing on some level, though I have used regular cotton machine sewing thread to appliqué or hand sew bindings down, and it twists and knots horribly, so maybe that can be attributed to the direction of the twist. I just can’t imagine trying to deal with knotting and twisting while you hand quilt though.

Anyway, I did what I could for this nice quilter in the shop, and gave her what other little helpful advice about hand quilting that I could on the fly since she’d never done it before. No, I don’t hand quilt anymore, but I did teach it for a while, so I at least have a few good tips. I can’t take credit however, for the very best tip about hand quilting ever. That one came from Kim DeCoste, Judy Murrah’s assistant with Quilts, Inc., when I worked at the Quilt Expo in Innsbruck, Austria in 1996. Yeah, I got to hobnob with the stars of the quilting world for a bit while I helped out in the Education Department, which Judy and Kim oversee.

Kim and I were standing around waiting to check participants in for a lecture, and chatting about quilting and our current projects. I was just starting the hand quilting on this project:

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I Love Quilting Sampler Quilt

It was the first project I’d ever hand quilted, and I was fumbling around a lot and my stitches were large, crooked and uneven. Kim’s advice about hand quilting was this:

Start with a really big needle, like a size 9. Learn the rocking motion and work on getting the stitches even. Once your stitches are straight and even and rocking your needle is easy for you, then switch to a size 10 needle. Your stitches will automatically become smaller with the smaller needle. Wash, rinse, repeat, switching to a smaller and smaller needle until your stitches are the size you want.

To be honest, at the time I was doubtful. It just sounded too easy. But I went home after the Expo and tried it out, and Kim was right on the money. I hand quilted this 36″ square sampler quilt, and by the time I quilted the cables in the border, my quilting stitches were straight, even, and nearly 12 stitches to the inch. I wouldn’t enter a quilt show in the hand quilting category, because it’s still not that great, but it’s definitely more than passable, and I’m sure Kim’s tip helped me get to the “pretty good” stage faster.

I shared this tip with the quilter in the shop, and told her it was too bad she lived in the opposite direction from the shop that I did, since I’d have been happy to share a spool of real hand quilting thread with her if she wanted to come by. I’m probably never going to use it for anything again!

Your Voice: what’s your best hand quilting tip?? Share it!

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I did a small bit of machine quilting today, and I thought I’d share some quick tips to make machine guided grid quilting easier. I’m making a small background quilt to display Inchies, so all I needed was some straight line quilting to hold the layers together and create some visual interest.

On a small quilt sandwich with unpieced bali fabrics on both sides and Hobbs 80/20 Black batting in the middle, I used a ruler and a hera marker to mark the straight quilting lines on the sandwich. A hera marker is simply a piece of plastic with a nicely tapered, curved edge which, when pressed on the fabric, compresses the fibers and leaves a mark that is fairly easy to see. Note that this particular model by Clover is the one I’ve had the best luck with; the others that I’ve tried have been made of softer plastic and didn’t make as nice a mark.

I marked the lines on the quilt sandwich in one direction only, meaning all the lines that are parallel to each other in an up and down direction. If you mark all the grid lines in both directions before you start quilting, you may find that when you mark the second set of lines across the first, the first set of lines will have little waves or points where the second set crosses them, and it will be difficult to quilt straight lines later.

When I’m quilting a grid, whether it’s big or small, I always start with a line of quilting close to the center of the quilt or space, and then work outward to the right and left. I always begin quilting at the top of the piece or area, and quilt toward the bottom, which means rolling up the bulk of the quilt to fit under the machine head when working on the left side. Even with a walking foot or IDT/dual feed, the layers of a quilt sandwich will shift; it’s just a fact of life.

Starting each line of quilting at the top will prevent diagonal wrinkles from forming on the quilt top or back from stitching lines in both directions. Remember this “top-to-bottom” stitching technique the next time you’re putting down stitch in the ditch between rows and blocks on a large quilt, too, as the same idea applies and the same diagonal wrinkles can happen, just on a larger scale.

Once the first set of gridlines was quilted, I marked the second set perpendicular to the first. The second set of quilting lines needs a bit more attention to detail than the first. When you start adding quilting lines that cross other lines, you can run into trouble when the fabric starts shifting. As you come up to a previous line of quilting, you may find that the top fabric of the quilt sandwich starts to form a little hill, which will become a pleat if you keep sewing.

The solution is to slow down and pay special attention in this area. You can use your fingers on the top of the quilt to gently nudge the top fabric toward the presser foot, essentially forcing the top fabric to feed more quickly into the machine to reverse the negative pushing effect that the presser foot is having on the quilt sandwich. Not just for grids, this little nudging technique is infinitely useful whenever I do any kind of machine guided quilting with a walking foot or IDT/dual feed.

A few simple techniques made quick work of this little display quilt, so stay tuned for pics!

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