That was fun!

This is just a follow up to Quilt Cam time while I was machine sewing on a binding!

Someone asked about my machine ---this is Barbie! She is a 1950s Japanese Singer-Clone based on a model 15. LOVE HER! She is straight stitch only, and I love her pinkness!

For everyone else that asked:

The yellow seam guide I use says Sewing Machine Seam Guide on it and has many holes for setting a seam width.

Because of so many requests – I’ve added the seam guide to my online store, but it is ONLY going to be available WITH BOOK PURCHASE. It is too small of an item to want to be packaging up 4, 000 of them individually. I sell them at my classes for $3 each. With book purchase including postage, they are $4.00

If you already have all the books…maybe there is a friend who would like one for her birthday, and you can buy a book and order the seam guide at the same time. I just have too many things going to be printing invoices and mailing labels for gobs of $3.00 plus postage items. But I CAN stick them easily into a book order. I hope this makes sense to you and that you understand.

Lynn asked what kind of iron I use ---it’s an older Rowenta that I got at the thrift shop for $3.99 and have been using for years. It gets good and hot, it has no auto shut-off and I never put water in it ever ever ever ever. Water is the one simple ingredient that will kill ANY iron!

Bonnie T from VA asked what size of square I used for my label in the corner of the quilt…..I cut about an 8” square and iron it in half diagonally to make a big triangle, and stitch it in to the back corner as my label.

Theresa, you asked why I do a 3/8” binding on my quilts…..the simple answer is because that is the width of seam my walking foot gives me when I use the edge of it as a guide to sew by! I can use a 2.5” binding strip this way. I like it better than a tiny 1/4” binding..just a bit more color shows!

I still have to get in my hour of hand quilting time ----and then to bed!

Night, Everyone!

Quilt Cam Binding Time!

I'm ready to put a binding on the Nearly Completely Insane quilt!

I've trimmed the quilt up.
I've cut my binding strips.
I have a sleeve piece ready.
I've got a label to attach!

I'm going to leave the QuiltCam up for about an hour or so----

*Note* If it says OFFLINE below -- you missed it! It's live streaming, not a recording, so you can't play it back like re-runs, you'll just have to join us next time!

Wanna join me?

Click Below!

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Quilting up a STORM!

Until the huge rain and thunder storm put my power out in the center of the LAST ROW I was quilting!

It was a doozy of a storm too….the power was out for hours, than was on again, then was off again. I gave up and went and took a nap!

Of course, it was on again when I woke up and I could have had this thing done a long time ago, but……the nap was nice too.

I’m tickled at how many are joining in with me on the One Hour of Needle & Thread challenge! I haven’t sat at mine yet today. With the power off, my house is way too dark! I’m in the woods, even with windows, it’s all shade and tree cover outside. The roof over the front porch makes that ALWAYS in shadow out there….and the basement is a hole with one small window that opens to tree covered shade so it’s dark EVERYWHERE with no power.

And too hot to want to light kerosene lamps. It’s got to be REALLY an emergency to want to create that heat in a house in the south in the summer!

However, the power came back on, and I finished the quilting!

I chose an edge to edge design that had no “real” motif to it…just swirls and curls. I didn’t want the pattern of the quilting to shout out from the quilt, I want the blocks to come forward. This quilt is all about the piecing, and there is loads of it.

I also needed something tight enough that “most” if not all the pieces had quilting running through them to anchor them down. This pattern hit nearly everything, except maybe in the blocks where the 1/2 square triangles are about the size of my little pinky finger nail.

I think it looks pretty good!

No matter what I chose, there was nothing that was going to look “1870”. Let’s be real. It’s machine quilting. Even stitch in the ditch is not appropriate quilting by machine for this kind of quilt, and I hate stitch in the ditch anyway! Baptist fans would not have hit enough of the pieces in each block leaving too many unquilted. Feathers? Noooo….that’s too fancy for this kind of quilt too. Too much icing on the cake..what’s next after that? Sew crystals to it? No thanks! This swirl will do! Swirls also perform another vaulable function….they can suck up areas of too much fullness – I had a couple blocks that were so heavily pieced that they poofed a bit, and the swirls eased them right in with no bagging or sagging.

I’m not particularly found of cross-hatching by machine either –One color of thread that crosses many colors of fabrics can make things look like a mattress pad. I used a sand colored thread that blended through everything as best as I could get it.

Now for the binding..... Red would be predictable?

But you know what I see when I look at these blocks? That Prussian blue!

It would be an unexpected punch that would tie the blue bits in the same way the yellow border made the yellows shine. I better go dig in the stash and see what I can find. But who knows, if I don't like it, I might still go with red.

Perhaps a bit later, we can have QuiltCam time for sewing on a binding!

But first – DH wants to go to town and I guess I’m going to have to ride shotgun.

One Hour of Simply Needle & Thread Linky!

September is National Sewing Month!

How perfect is this for Simply Needle & Thread?

Last night I got all of my stuff together and put it in my comfy chair down here in my studio. It will nag at me all day this way, begging me to sit and do some stitches!

Want to see where I’m working?

Even though my studio room is long and narrow, I’m lucky to have enough room for a pair of chairs. It’s not “House Beautiful” down here --- there are cords that run across the floor – the yellow one you see is a heavy duty extension from the other side of the basement – for the iron. I can’t run the quilting machine and the iron on the same circuit or it blows the breaker. Necessity beats aesthetics, you know? Yes, there is a yellow cord all the way across the basement. So what. It works!

I’ve got everything I need right by my chair. My thread, needles, scissors, seam ripper for removing basting and a tall insulated cup of my favorite Margarita Crystal Light!

From here I’ve got a perfect view of what’s on Netflix! I hardly watch “regular” TV ---I like that I don’t have political ads, or ads of any sort. I love movies!

After watching a movie, and finding that I had completed the hand quilting on 3 complete LARGE fans ---I marked down the time I’d spent –an hour and a half! And went to bed! That wasn’t so hard!

Since September IS National Sewing Month – I think it’s the perfect time to put those hand stitches in projects that have been languishing. I’m hoping to get some more in today. And I think tracking myself on my calendar page that will be kept right by my chair will help me to see that progress!

If you are joining in and have a blog and want to link up below, please do!

Remember, we need the address of the specific POST when you link up. The address should end in .html NOT .com For instance, my blog address is quiltville.blogspot.com and that simply isn’t enough. To get the address of your specific POST, click on the title of the post and the address should appear at the top of your browser in the address bar.

The address for THIS post is http://quiltville.blogspot.com/2012/09/september-is-national-sewing-month.html see the difference?

When in doubt, ask me. If you link it to your whole blog I’ll have to delete your entry and have you try again because I can’t fix it for you.

Write a post of the project you are going to be working on this month. Show us where you sew, make your post interesting! Tell us about the project and why it has languished….let’s get those stitches in, one at a time!

16 Batikers in Bali!

Yes, my body clock is still out of whack, so I'm sending this post now! It's only 9:30pm you know?

It was our day to be students, and we were all so excited!

We’d been to the warehouse. ((And bought oodles of fabric!))

We’d seen how commercial batik fabric was made, but what about the original artistry of the “REAL” batik, the way the Balinese have made it an art form over the centuries?

I’d had batiking classes in school through my art studies, and when batik fabrics first came to the states back in the “90s” ---These were NOT like what I remembered batiking to be. Similar yes, but there were no “pictures” to them. Just textures and over dyed color.

I so distinctly remember my first classes. The smell of the wax, the tool in my hand, the tedious process of drawing, waxing, dying…over waxing dyed areas so the next dye would resist that area, and so forth, painting in areas with a brush.

Would you believe my first batik ever in school was an image of a banana split? It was a fun project. I wonder whatever happened to that – that was long before married life and children and many moves ---

We loaded up the tour bus…all of us eager to get in and DO IT! We wound through neighborhoods, through the center of towns --- all getting decorated for Thanksgiving Garungan Day, remember? We parked the bus down by the monkey forest road in Ubud – the bus was too big to go where we were going!

From here we all loaded into separate vehicles and off we went! Our driver introduced himself to us as “Chili”. As in Chili Pepper. As in SPICY HOT! And we all laughed. He asked our names, and then began to sing a silly song, including all of our names in it. SO FUN! I wish I had gotten a picture of his vehicle…the ever present offering in place right there on the dashboard. “Please keep my passengers safe from my driving!”

We arrived to find ourselves at the Widya Batik Studio! Oh Boy!

The walls were lined with gorgeous batiks handmade by the artists who were teaching us! The method of traditional Balinese batiking was discussed and demonstrated.

This map is a batik piece. Mawa gave us ALL paper maps and told us that Bali looks like a chicken that’s laid an egg. He is right, it does! LOL!

We had our choice …..we could wood block stamp with wax…remember the wood blocks from the Block Stamping at the factory? These are much the same.

More stamping blocks to choose from! Some were wood, some were metal!

We could also choose from a multitude of designs to trace ourselves if we wanted. Sometimes just SEEING the traced designs can start your brain going on what you want to do ---and suddenly it hit me—I was going to DRAW!

I started out freehand on a piece of paper. When things were the way I wanted them to be…I slipped the paper under my fabric and traced.

Aren’t we SO busy!!

Here is my design on the fabric!

Our instructor showed us how the waxing is done. He dips a stylus into the melted pot of wax on the burner and carefully leaves a line of wax to cover each pencil line. It’s a painstaking process and not as easy as it looks!

Pauline is a trooper! She got in there and got busy with it – the woman has NO FEAR! She did a great job too! For those of us who weren’t sure, the instructors sat and showed us how to do it by waxing our fabrics for us! LOL! Yeah, it was the cheaters way out –but we still learned a lot by watching!

Here they are dipping their tools into the melted wax…this little stand is just COVERED with wax inside and out..the surround protects the other areas from getting wax where it isn’t supposed to go. I was fascinated by the ads in the local paper!

Mary is trying the stamped designs on her fabric!

Once the waxing is complete the dye is applied with brushes! Pick a color and get down to it! Put a color where you want a color..put another color somewhere else. After the sun dries the dye, the wax will be boiled away leaving a white dividing line between the colored areas. This was SO FUN!

		Batiking in Bali, Aug 2012 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

There were so many photos and this post is getting long so I uploaded the rest to a slide show! Yes, there are chickens everywhere! And bananas growing on trees! We were in a magical place letting our inner child come out to play.

After our dye has dried in the sun, it’s time to boil out the wax! You’ll see photos of that in the pics above as well!

This is my boiled and drying batik piece!

This whole process was very much what I had done in school, and it was so fun to do it again. I am thrilled with how my piece came out – not sure what I’ll do with it yet!

Photo op with the family’s shrine behind me! What a memorable day for everyone – and to think – at this point we were only on our second full day!