You'll remember Donaleen's work from her cool fireplace screen. She's back this time with a cool pillow made with a variety of fabrics, including many from the Red Alert Stash pack.
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If you have made anything with my hand dyed fabric I hope you will consider sharing it in the Customer Gallery. In appreciation you will receive a 20% shop coupon that's good for 3 months!

My friend, Patty the Quilt Lady, has made several veterans quilt tops for us over the years and she gifted us with two more this year! If you want to see them in their full glory you can see them on her blog here and here.

I also dyed 4 new quilt backs for veterans quilts and Patty's quilts will work perfectly with the medium blue at the bottom. Each one of these quilt backs serves 2 quilts. If I ever finish Lost My Marbles I'll be able to load and quilt these!

But that's not all! Patty also send me a big collection of keys! Now you may be wondering why someone would want a bunch of keys that no longer unlock anything. Well, just think for a few moments while I untape these.

Did you figure it out? 
What we have here is the focus of my next sun printing session! 
You know, I'm really big on decluttering and even have yard sale and thrift store piles being built right now. But I'll never get rid of my "trash". This is a lot more valuable to me than the plates that are going into the yard sale next month.
​We're all like that, right?

More marbles quilted this week!

I'm sure as time goes on I'll have plenty of duplicates. I'm not working very hard to avoid duplication. I'm just trying to try different things and I'm having fun and that's all that matters!

Everyone goes through change phases in life and my family is in the middle of one of those change phases right now. 
For the last 11 years my Mom and her sister have lived together in a town about 2 hours from me and it's worked great. It's been especially nice for my Mom the past 4 years because her granddaughter has been at college in the same town. But Alana is graduating and Mom has spent a lot of time here with eye doctor visits the past year so we all agreed that it's time for her to move to Richmond. That means it's time for my Aunt to move near her daughter in Florida. 
My Mom, who always views every change as an adventure is excited about her move. My Aunt, not so much! I thought it might help a little to have a greeting waiting for her when she arrives at her new home so I got busy Friday night to make a card that should be there when she gets "home" today.

I wasn't going to spent hours this so I set some parameters to fabrics from my bin of pre-fused fabrics and I wasn't going to do any stenciling or anything else that would have a lot of prep or cleanup time.
You know that I like to give myself boxes to work in!
Anyway, first I needed a theme and went to Google for a list of state "things" of Florida and settled on the flower: an orange blossom.
Thank you Google Images for this feast of reference photos.

I'm lick that I have a BIG bin of pre-fused fabric. So I cut some leaves, orange circles and white petals and started playing around with arrangements.

I went with the light blue background because I had a card already fused with it! Then I decided on one orange and one blossom.

I start from the back to add the elements so the leave were fused and stitched first.

Next was the orange.

Then the blossom.

Then I fused on the back and stitched the edges. But it still needed a little something.

A little puff paint was just the right finish! Hopefully it will make it to Florida on time and in good shape. 
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I rarely make a single card but this time it was just right.

I'm pretty focused these days on quilting Spirograph motifs and blanket stitch applique. But this weekend was the monthly sewing retreat with my quilt club. I was only able to go on Friday but made some great progress on Stars at Sea for just one day. It's hard to tell on the white design wall, but this is 2 sections.

You can see from the diagram that I've done the center and Section 1.

Doing all of the cutting and organizing ahead of time made it fun to just sit and start sewing. 

This week should be more Spirograph and blanket stitch applique plus a couple of little projects. But first a detour to the eye doctor. I got a GIANT floater in my left eye last night. Fortunately I was able to talk to my doctor and he talked me off the ceiling but he still wants to check it out today. Seems like it's just going to be an annoyance for a few months. I'll take that over other alternatives! 

If you follow my customer gallery you have seen David Armour's work before. All of his work is based on a mesmerizing crystal-like structure and he uses color and value to great effect. You can follow David on his Facebook page. David doesn't name his pieces so we'll just call this one Amazing.  David combines fabrics from me, other dyers and some commercial fabrics.
​Here are a couple of detail shots.

Two weeks ago we had a great program at Country School Quilters with Lisa Loessel, one of the lead designers at Henry Glass fabrics, and the sister of one of our members. She generously gave us some great patriotic fabrics. I didn't want to hid these away int he stash so I decided to make some new placemats with some of them.

I'm not going to give a tutorial for these because I didn't take enough photos but I wanted to show you how I did the center wonky star. I wanted to do a stack and cut technique but I wasn't sure what size square I needed to start with so that I'd finish with a star big enough that I could trim to 11.5". I drew an 11" (finished size) square on paper and cut it apart. Then I spread the pieces out on my fabric allowing for generous seam allowance. That led me to cutting 14" squares to start with.

Then I cut the star out. I tried to make sure that my star points did not go to the edge of the fabric because I didn't want to end up trimming off points when I cut the block down to size.

They aren't going to set the world on fire from a design perspective but they are going to look just fine on my table for Memorial Day and July 4th.

This month at CSQ we are playing bingo and have to bring blocks to exchange for cards. I used the rest of my fabrics to make 6 blocks. These will be turned into veterans quilt tops that will eventually be returned to me to quilt.

Because of my Save My Bleeding Quilt article, this topic comes up a lot for me. It's also a bit of a pet peeve. There's SO MUCH BAD INFORMATION out there about dealing with bleeding fabrics and about how to process hand dyed fabrics so that they don't bleed. It annoys me no end so I will continue to talk about it any time I get a chance.

When I was vending at Birds of a Feather I had a free handout in my booth to help continue spreading the word.

It was there that I met Rhonda M from Houston. Her home was flooded during Hurricane Harvey and one of her quilts bled when she washed it. I gave her the handout and talked her through the soaking process to try to get the dye out of her quilt. It doesn't work all the time but it works best when the bleeding is spotty like this.

Another reader recently had a quilt that turned an even pink all over so that meant that the other fabrics in the quilt really wanted that dye and absorbed it. She was able to get about half of the pink out but not all of it.

But Rhonda has much better luck! All of the dye came out of her quilt and she's happy again. These stories make me very happy too. I get at least one query or story every week about dealing with bleeding quilts. It's really sad because this can all be avoided by soaking fabric, using my process, as soon as it comes into your house.

I've decided that today I want to try to address some of the specific comments that I've seen lately on Facebook and some information that I heard in an online dyeing class.
About commercial fabric and quilts:

Just giving a quilt with some color catchers is not a very nice way to gift a quilt but it seems the favorite Facebook way to gift a quilt. If you are worried about a quilt bleeding please take the time to either soak the fabrics before you make the quilt or soak the quilt before you give it. Color catchers aren't going to prevent or fix a bleeding problem. They look really cool but it's the soap that does the work. Let's say you gift a quilt and it bleeds the first time the recipient washes it do you think they are going to tell you that they ruined "your" quilt? No! They are going to stuff it in a closet and hope you never ask about it again. It will eventually be used for moving pads or pet bedding. They will never know that it could probably be fixed.

Soap and water are the key and you need plenty of both. A soap molecule is hydrophilic on one end and hydrophobic on the other. The hydrophilic end really wants to attach to a water molecule. The hydrophobic end hates water and looks for something else to attach to. That something else might be dirt, oil or loose dye particles. That means that you need lots of water molecules and lots of soap molecules to pick up all of the loose dye molecules. If that dye doesn't get attached to a water molecule it's going to attach back to the fabric. You can't fix a bleeding fabric or quilt in a HE washing machine. There simply isn't enough water.

Time is also important. Some dyes take a while to let go. Blues are especially notorious. Soak a minimum of 8 hours to make sure that the fabric isn't going to bleed. This is why simply pre-washing fabric will not work. I recently bought a commercial purple fabric. I washed it once just to test my theory. I put in a color catcher to see if it bled in the wash. It didn't. Then I soaked it overnight and by morning the water was DARK purple! It was eventually going to bleed during one of the washings had I not soaked that fabric because exposure to water is cumulative. 

Any Dawn detergent will do. There's nothing magical about Blue Dawn! I compared the ingredients on all of the Dawn products and they should all work equally fine. I only tested the Dawn Pure Essentials but would use whichever is closest. Dawn does work better than Synthrapol and is a lot less expensive.

Don't use Retayne to fix a bleeding quilt! Retayne "retains" dyes. That means that if there's loose dye in the water the Retayne will do a great job of attracting that loose dye back to your quilt and not necessarily where it came from. Retayne was developed for fabric dyers and I learned the hard way that you can only use Retayne on single color fabric.

Regarding hand dyed fabrics:

If you dye or purchase hand dyed fabric the same rules about water, soap and time apply. Here's the process I use to make sure that my fabrics are colorfast. With this process I can wash all of my fabrics together with no back staining. I wash yellows and dark blues together with no problem.

1. Rinse the fabric in cold water first to remove any soda ash. Put the fabric in a bucket or sink of cold water while you rinse out all of your fabrics.
2. If the fabric is very dark I might run through a couple of quick cold soaks to get some of the quick releasing dye out. Once the water is dark I drain.
3. Fill a large tub or sink with HOT water and enough soap to get a good suds. Add the fabric and agitate the fabric wearing heavy gloves. Cover the fabric with plastic bin lid and weight them with bins of water. You want all of the fabric under water.
4. Check the water in an hour. If the water is dark drain it and fill the tub again with HOT water. Check in a few hours and repeat if necessary.
5. Leave the fabric to soak 12 hours. Change the water and soak 12 more hours. Do this every 12 hours until the water is clear.

Yellows and oranges will be done within 12 hours, reds generally take 24 - 36 and turquoise and cerulean blues can take 48 hours. 

​If you follow this you will have colorfast hand dyed fabric that you can safely use in any project. 

OK, I feel better now that I've got all of that off my chest and it's time for me to rinse out yesterday's dyed fabric.

From the minute that I started making this quilt I knew that I wanted to do Spirograph quilting in the circles. I bought every circle and oval ruler from Quilter's Apothecary so that I'd have every possible curve. Quilter's Apothecary is the only place I know of that has every circle size in 1/2 inch increments. They also have a wonderful set of ovals.

​Then a couple of years ago I found Sue Heinz and her Circleliner series of marking tools. Her tools make is easy to divide circles into increments of 3, 4, 5 and 7 so I can divide a circle into 6, 15, 21, 16 and lots of other increments. 

With these tools I was ready to get started.

For reference here's the quilt top right after I finished it in February 2015. Every one of those 109 circles will have a Spirograph type design.
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​In this series of posts I'll share each motif I quilt and show the rulers I used to get that design. These aren't meant to be tutorials. If you've played with a Spirograph you will be able to figure it out on your own. Today I'm posting my first 6 designs. Only 103 left to go!

Progress on my applique project came to a halt during the football playoffs. With the Eagles involved I just couldn't relax enough do any sewing during those games. Then the Birds of a Feather conference came and I was getting ready for and then recovering from that. So it's been about a month since I worked on this. I'm finally back in a groove and Chris and I are watching some Netflix in the evenings. This weekend I finished the 3rd border!

You would think that with 3 of 4 borders done that I'd be 75% done but I have 4 corner blossoms and I have to sew the borders on the quilt before I can do those.

Here are the rest of the blossoms on that border. I've already got the center dot appliqued on the last border and I'm very motivated to get it done.

I also started my Spirograph quilting on my Lost My Marbles quilt. I'll post about that as soon as I get the photos edited.