Canterbury Knight…At the quilting stage finally

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Betty Jo's Blog / Posted in Art Quilt Techniques, Quilt Journal, Tools

I finally got to the quilting stage on my Canterbury Knight, and am having a lot of fun on it. I just haven’t yet decided how I am going to quilt the grassy parts. The castle is done and looks like a castle, instead of a white silhouette of a Disney castle. 🙂 LOL Here it is about half-way through the quilting of the little castle. I spent a ridiculous amount of time on this small part of my quilt.

Using my Bernina BSR with Superior 100 wt silk on top and Bottom Line in the bobbin.

I quilted the roofs of the castle in dark gray, and then I inked in the windows and the roofs with medium gray. It looks pretty good, but it made the roofs too close in value to the sky fabric. I don’t know if I will do anything about that. Not sure what I can do. I like it a lot as it is, but I think the judges will think there is not enough contrast. The towers are all still white, though, so that may be sufficient.

For those of you with Berninas and BSRs, you may be interested in my settings (sewing slowly):

For the castle: 100 wt. silk thread, 70 titanium top stitch needle, 2.75 top tension, Bottom Line 60 wt poly in the bobbin threaded for embroidery, 2.0 stitch length. I then changed to 40 wt (set like sky settings below) gray and re-outlined the towers, and did roof tiles like tiny clam sells. After that was done, I did the inking.

For the sky: 40 wt. polyester Superior Rainbow, 90 titanium top stitch needle, 2.5 top tension, Bottom Line 60 wt. poly in the bobbin threaded for embroidery, 2.10 stitch length. I did the wind roses from this practice piece:

Practice for the sky and water

I still haven’t decided what to do with the grassy parts, and since the marks on the black border are really disappearing, I think I will move on to that next.

Sew happy everyone! Teach someone to cook or sew…your grandson, your son, your husband, your father. Share the fun.

Announcing “Betty Jo’s Fabric Arts” and What I Plan to Do With It

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Betty Jo's Blog / Posted in A Little How-To, My micro-business / 4 Comments

EEEK! I’ve actually done it. I’ve gone and set up a micro-business!!!

This week I received the finished paperwork on establishing my micro-business “Betty Jo’s Fabric Arts”. I have a few more more steps before I can start offering downloadable items, and those are getting a shopping cart arranged and filling the shop part of my business with items you might want.

As some of you know, I retired from my intense US Government job on 31 December 2012, and have been slowly pursuing my plans to open this micro-business ever since. My expectations are to make enough money to pay for my fabric arts pursuits, provide money for attending some of those marvelous quilt shows, have a little spending money for fun and to travel to see my family in California. Sew it is very much a “Micro” business. This will also provide me a way to share more of what I have learned in my sixty plus years of sewing and art pursuits and eight or so years of taking art quilting seriously.

The first three years of my retirement I spent largely in setting up my workspace and learning, learning, learning…filling in all those gaps that exist between expert sewing and expert art quilting. I hope that I will continue to learn. There is so MUCH to learn. That’s part of what makes fabric arts so great…lots to learn, lots to experiment with, lots to share.

The process I used to set this up, as requested by my friend Maggie: As you may be aware, over the past few years I built my website and blog, and shared where I felt I could. Last week, I also registered the website name www.bettyjosfabricarts.com with GoDaddy and connected it to my existing website www.bjfabricartist.com This past month I went through Legalzoom.com and set up my “Doing Business As” or DBA. The cool thing about them is by using their questionnaire and putting in what you want, what state you are in, and so on, they take it from there. They work out the paper work, they send it to you. You take it and get it notarized, and send it back to them. They deal with the government entities and send you your license. They have lawyers available to talk to if you need to. I think it is just right for a micro business like mine. If you are setting up a more involved business, you might want to talk with a lawyer and get them to take this on. But this only cost me right around $150, plus the cost of my GoDaddy and Blog accounts. Not so bad, considering. I’m sort of a do-everything-myself kind of person, so I built my own website through GoDaddy. There are some really good tax and record keeping programs out there to help you with keeping the books too. I use Intuit who make TurboTax, but there are several good ones. This is a vast improvement over the way I had to work more than 30 years ago when I set up my own fashion design business in Ithaca, NY. and did everything on paper. The bookwork was dreadful, and took a large chunk of time. Of course, then I had two employees, the hiring of whom cost me all of my profits for a while, but I will not have employees for this little business.

You may be wondering what I am planning on offering for downloads. My intent is to provide you with the tools you need to make the fabric art visions in your head or improve the projects you purchase from someone else. Here is my initial list and it is truly subject to change:

1. Embroidery items for your embroidery machines like trees, flowers, flags, other small items to spice up your landscape quilts, or small in-the-hoop projects. I am currently working on a set of trees. Trees seem to be something I have needed a lot over the past few years and I have been unhappy with downloads I have purchased in the past, so I am digitizing them myself.

2. Patterns and/or step-by-step instructions for building your own incredible pieces of wall art.

3. I am writing two books (or is it a series of worksheets?). One is on all the different techniques I use for machine applique, and when to use each type. The second is on surface design…painting, thread work, beading. It’s entirely possible these will boil down to a series of worksheets complete with some projects and step-by-step instructions that will help you practice, rather than actual books.

4. Digitally painted items you may wish to download and print on fabric using your own inkjet printer, such as faces and hands, horses ready to applique and add threadwork for their tales and manes, small characters for appliqueing on your landscape quilt. These will come with instructions.

5. And finally, worksheets with learning projects on using technology in your sewing and quilting studio. This would include, for instance, how to use Corel Draw with Bernina v7 software to produce a provided wall art project. Or using a digital painting program, such as Corel Painter 2015 and a Wacom tablet to paint and draw your own faces and hands, or horses and dogs for printing on fabric. Or even a project with worksheet in taking your advanced sewing machines through their paces to help you to create that incredible piece of fabric art of your own.

6. Videos may accompany some of the items above.

In truth, I don’t expect many downloads to be available much before summer, and after that, they will be added from time to time. I plan on putting just a few up in the spring to help test the download, and shoppng cart system. I will be looking for guinea pigs, ur, testers and reviewers for some of my things as they come out, sew keep that in mind if you are interested. Sew this will probably take me a few months to get really rolling even though I now have the structure set up…kind of like building a house. I have the foundation made and the walls up, but I have to put all the inside finishes in.

Sew happy everyone! Learn a new technique every now and then and practice, practice, practice.

Canterbury Knight: Inking fusible appliques

Posted on February 6, 2015February 7, 2015 by Betty Jo's Blog / Posted in A Little How-To, Applique, Art Quilt Techniques, Design Work, Quilt Journal, Techniques

Some of the border items on my Canterbury Knight quilt need to be created off quilt and appliqued on, as opposed to painting directly onto the border. Sew I had an idea to just take the item, cut it out of the full sized print version (digitally, using Corel Draw), and reverse it, and print it onto some fusible web with the protective paper still on it. Originally, I was going to just iron it onto some appropriately colored pieces of cotton/silk Radiance and applique them on. But when I got the printout (in color), I decided to put the web onto prepared-for-dye radiance and see if I could ink in the designs. This is how it worked:

1. Here is my design printed onto the 8 1/2 x 11 inch fusible web piece. It is sitting on my light box.

2. Sew then I ironed it onto the radiance, turned it over, and taped it all to the light box. I also found a small piece of the black silk, that I would be appliqueing it to, in order to place it under the white PFD radiance and test how the inks looked before I inked it.

Working on the boy musician who is announcing the arrival of the knight to the castle.

Here is another one ready to ink.

I think of this character as “the angry bird” in the border. He’s fun.

And then I begin the inking. Note that I went over the line in a few places and some of the edges are a little smudgy, because the inks run a little more on the Radiance than they do on cotton. It’s ok, the edges will be cut smoothly or outlined with quilting. Pressing with a hot dry iron will stop the run.

Inking

Here are the small birds I placed around the text box. These were the first ones I did this way.

My painted birds ready to applique, their feet will be added after appliqueing.

And here you see the completely inked boy. I cut him carefully out. The bright colors get slightly muted when appliqued onto the black fabric.

I used Pitt’s Artist Markers. These markers are India inks, acid free, and appear to be permanent on cotton after heat setting. i am not planning to wash this quilt at all, so I have not tested the colorfastness through the washing process for the silk/cotton. I had noticed a note on Dick Blick’s where I order my markers from that they are not recommended for fabrics. This concerned me, since I have been using them for years on my fabric arts. So I wrote to Faber Castell and asked them why. This was their response the very next day:

“Dear Ms. Tatum:

Thank you for your interest in Faber-Castell and the Art & Graphic Brand.

PITT Artist pens are not intended to be used on fabrics that are laundered because it will not remain on all fabrics when washed. Therefore, testing is always recommended, depending on different variables some things work, some don’t. Could you tell me how you are heat setting them, as this helps them endure a washing?

Please let me know if I can assist any further as I will surely do my best to help.”

I will say that I usually use prepared for dye fabrics for inking, but not always. I always heat set the inking with steam. If it is silk, I turn it over onto a piece of fine cotton and heat set from the back. I have washed several of my cotton quilts with Pitt Artist Markers several times, and some of them have been around nine years now with no fading or running. If you plan to use this product, do your own tests please.

Sew happy everyone! Teach someone to quilt or sew…your grand kids, your grown kids, your young kids, your cat, your dog…Cheers!