My Very First Spoonflower Order

I have had an account with Spoonflower for years, and have always wanted to order some custom fabric from them, but the time never seemed quite right, until now, and now that I've received my order, I must say I LOVE their product! It's exactly what I was hoping for, and the colors and textures from my original image have carried over into fabric beautifully.

For anybody who does not know what Spoonflower is, it's basically one of the most powerful services available to an art quilter who wants to design her own fabric. Anyone with access to a computer and even super basic image editing software can upload an image to their site and have it printed on a variety of fabrics.  The fabric is washable, and the inkjet printing leaves no "feel" on the surface, so it can be used for quilts, clothing, table cloths, whatever you can think of! 

One yard of super bright, crisply detailed fabric.  Enough to cover a dog!

For my first order, I did not go with a repeating pattern but instead just created a yard-of-fabric sized file in Photoshop and dragged various images into it.  Spoonflower takes images that are 150 dpi and a yard of fabric is 36" by 42" - a file that big was pretty unwieldy, but it did manage to upload eventually!

The leafy photograph in the corner of the fabric is destined to be a wholecloth quilt with oil paint stick additions to bring out the quilting.

The polka dots should be useful for a variety of projects - that image I made back when I was in college, by hand-gluing a zillion 1/4" hole punches onto a piece of 8.5" by 11" card stock.  So. Much. Work, but it has continued to be useful ever since!

Most patient dog ever. I do love to torture him.

There are many ways to make a perfectly repeating pattern to print onto fabric, and Julia Rothman has written a superlative tutorial about how you can create your repeat by hand, using paper and simple drawing tools.  Her instructions are clear and easy to follow, and her method requires only minimal computer assistance. 

Most people use either Photoshop or Illustrator to make their patterns, and the methods of doing this vary wildly.  I plan to create a tutorial about the specific way I create repeating patterns in Photoshop, so keep an eye out for that here on the blog in the next month or two. Here are two of the repeats I've created in the past few years:

Penguin fabric I designed for Thing-a-Day a few years ago.

One of my first ever patterns, drawn by hand based on Julia's instructions and colored using Photoshop.

Oh, and I just found out that there's a comparison of different custom-fabric printing services over on True Up that's way more thorough and comprehensive than my "I ordered this and it looked nice" method of judging a product.  Go check it out!

Product Review: A Big Thumbs-Down to Poly-Fil Hi-Loft Batting

I recently decided it might be fun to try free motion quilting in a way that would produce more dimension on the surface of my quilts, so I went out and bought a crib size piece of Poly-Fil Hi-Loft batting to experiment with.  My standard go-to batting is Warm & Natural 100% cotton, so I knew that the all-polyester, far fluffier batting would take some getting used to.

Poly-Fil Hi-Loft batting... Can I find a use for it?

As it turns out the fluffiness did not bother me at all, but there was a far greater concern that may prevent me from ever using this batting for serious projects.  Poly-Fil claims to be flame retardant, and this is in fact true - it just gets all smelly and melty instead of catching fire.  However, it turns out the batting is decidedly NOT heat-resistant.  The minute you touch it with a hot iron, it flattens right up and sticks to itself, completely and permanently ruining its loftiness!  For many quilters this would not be a problem, but for me it's disastrous!  I tend to add a lot of paints, fabric markers, iron-on transfers and fusible applique during or after my quilting process, and all of these things benefit from heat-setting.  If Poly-Fil is going to give up its fluffy ghost the moment it gets pressed (the batting flattens after less than ten seconds of ironing), then it is never going to be the batting for me.

Squashed, flattened bits.  So annoying!

I'm very glad I decided to only purchase the crib size batting - I'm sure that I can come up with some simple pieced projects to use the remaining batting for, but for any real art quilting I am going right back to my Warm & Natural!
If anyone has suggestions about which batting they prefer to use and which projects it excels at, please leave them in the comments - I would love to hear your ideas!

How to Organize Your Sewing Machine Accessories

I recently acquired a new Bernina, and with this machine came an organizational challenge I've never had to face with my little Pfaff Hobby 1030.  With my Pfaff, all the accessories and feet that came with it can fit into the slide-on accessory bin that slides onto the machine and doubles as a sewing surface.  Since I've only acquired one extra foot for that machine, the built in storage has always been perfectly adequate.

Whole different story with my Bernina 530!  Between the feet it came with, the ones I ordered when I purchased the machine, the various tools, needles and accessories, AND the feet I'm sure I'll keep impulse purchasing as time goes on, there was NO WAY the lame storage box that came with the machine would ever meet my needs.  Below is the box I ended up buying to hold all the stuff, after spending an extremely enjoyable hour and a half at the Container Store, trying to put sewing machine feet into every box in there while chatting with a nice young man who seemed to share my enthusiasm for changeable compartments.

My exciting new Bernina accessory storage solution

This is the accessory box that came with the machine.  Very attractive, but in the end the thing is not well designed AT ALL!

Very stylish, too bad it doesn't do its job!

Here are the problems with the Bernina accessory storage box:

• It does not have enough little compartments to hold nearly the number of feet I'll eventually own! 
• When you zip it closed and take it somewhere, the feet and other accessories get all mixed up together because the box is not capable of keeping each item in its place. 
• The little foot-compartments are nearly all the same size, and one of the feet that came with the machine didn't even have a place it could fit comfortably.  The only foot that has a truly perfect little cubby of its own is the automatic buttonhole foot (as we'll see later in the post, that one actually gave me a bit of a challenge when creating the new system!) 
• All the non-feet accessories just have to be piled together in one L-shaped compartment and it's annoying to dig through there looking for the one thing you need. 
• As if all that weren't enough, the accessory box is flocked on the inside, and continually sheds fine black fibers onto everything inside it.  

The accessory box's interior after being carried around in my bag.

Here's how beautiful everything looks now: 

A perfectly sized place for everything, plus tons of room to grow!

 I wanted each foot to be super easy to spot at a glance, so I printed individual labels from my computer and affixed them with packing tape.  My label maker is away from home at the moment, and plus these labels look extremely cute! 

Everything neatly labeled and easy to find.

I decided bobbins didn't need to be factored into my container choice, since I already have a perfect way to store them: 

These rubber doughnut shaped rings are absolutely my favorite bobbin storage solution!

Everything about this plan was falling so perfectly into place, but there did end up being one small challenge.  The automatic buttonhole foot that came my machine, the one that fits so perfectly into the Bernina case, was just not quite able to go all the way into this new box.  Fortunately, the solution to this problem ended up being both fun and dramatic.

The automatic buttonhole foot does not quite fit into my box, so I'll just have to change the box!

I decided to melt a hole between two rows to make an appropriately shaped spot for the buttonhole foot.  I marked where I would need to cut the plastic with a sharpie, then cut into it using a wood burning tool. 

Melting the plastic with a wood burning tool.

It turns out that melting this kind of plastic with a wood burning tool is extremely easy, but does produce stinky, probably hazardous fumes, so if you do something similar, make sure there's good ventilation. 

The automatic buttonhole foot in its new home.

My new marvel of organization makes me super happy, and is able to hold almost every foot I might buy, except for bulkier ones like the walking foot or the cutting attachment.  It does take up a bit more space than the old box, but the space is now used so much better!

Old container and larger new contaniner

Now that I have them all so delightfully organized, stay tuned in the future as I post detailed reviews of some of the more fun and strange Bernina feet I have acquired!

Product Review: Sewline Mechanical Fabric Pencil Lives Up to Its Reputation

I kept hearing that the Sewline Mechanical Fabric Pencil is the best tool ever for making beautifully readable, completely removable marks on dark colored fabrics, so I decided to pick one up and see for myself.  At around $16 per pencil, it's a bit of a pricey impulse purchase, but I hoped I would find it to be the perfect tool. The Sewline pencil comes in a few different colors, and I decided to go with basic white lead. 

The Sewline pencil has a nice rubbery grip and operates just like any mechanical pencil.

Essentially, what I found is that this product lives up to its hype!  

 

Lead is advanced by clicking on eraser.

The "lead is nice and fine, advances easily, and writes very cleanly as long as your fabric is fairly smooth.  The white stands out brightly on dark fabrics, though it can be a bit difficult to see on fabrics with prints that include light values.

It is extremely easily to create straight lines, or to draw any shape you like.

One of the big questions with any fabric marking implement is, how easy is it to remove the marks once you no longer need them. The Sewline pencil does include a built in eraser, but I think I will probably not use it a whole lot because, while it does seem to work, it's extremely inefficient to use if you want to erase marks from any decent area of fabric. 

Twist metal end to advance eraser. 

If the fabric is extremely smooth, I've found the pencil marks can be removed simply by rubbing with a paper towel or another piece of dry fabric, but for fabric with any texture to it, a damp cloth seems to be effective. 

Lines after being erased with damp cloth

The lines appear very slightly after being scoured with a damp cloth, but I find that after a few days of additional handling, they disappear pretty completely.
 
Summary:
PROS: The Sewline does seem to be a solid, easy to use marking tool!  I love the clean, smooth, fine marks it makes which are both super visible and quite easy to remove.
CONS: The only issue I can see with this product is that the lead gets used up extremely quickly, so refills may need to be purchased often.