Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Quilting

While I read out loud, Deborah works on her quilt. The whole center section is done; now she's working on the border. This is a quilt where Deborah and her mother each made a full set of blocks, and then traded half of them, producing two-of-a-kind quilts. A few blocks of interest:


Elephants in a jar. I refer to this as "wildlife preserves," but Deborah is thoroughly sick of that joke by now. So I'm going to stop using it. It's just so tempting, though...


Deborah and I made these together. Deborah made paper snowflakes, and ironed them flat; I took an airbrush loaded with bleach and sprayed the cloth, using the snowflake as a resist. Then I passed it back to Deborah, who was waiting with an iron — it was the fastest way we found to stop the bleach from spreading too far. She then quilted with the pattern of the snowflake, making it stand out even more.



Kitties. The eyes are made of buttons.

2 comments:

Carolyn Kerr said...

I really like those quilt blocks, especially the snowflake one. That is a clever idea, using the bleach. Why does ironing it stop the bleach action? Because it dries it up? Doesn't the bleach start acting again if the piece gets wet again? Or were you using peroxide that would completely evaporate with heating? The elephants are cute, and so is your punny name for them, but yes, I suppose it would get old after a while. Congratulations, Deborah, on the quilt. Perhaps in a few years I will have time to do some of that. It would be fun to learn something new and useful.

Andy said...

The ironing stopped the bleaching because it dried it up. We threw all the pieces into the washing machine (with a lot of water!) a few minutes later, with the idea that this would dilute anything that was left. We couldn't have left it to dry on it's own, though, because the bleach would have spread along the fabric, blurring the edges we'd worked to make.