With extra time on our hands (our slow season in t-shirt printing!), my husband and I have been making good use of our time and have been being creative!
Gregg has been out in the print studio working away on hand-printed fabric! It all starts with coming up with some imagery. For this run, he printed the words: “the shortest distance between two points of view is love”, an arrow between the words “you” and “me”, and a bunch of little hearts.
Lightbox in print studio:
Ink table full of inks:
I’ve talked about the process of screen printing here before with a little more detail here. Printing fabric is a difficult thing and takes a lot of time due to the limited area coverage of our screens.
While Gregg has been busy in the print studio, I’ve been busy myself – I’ve started two new quilts! One is going to be another hexagon quilt – this time bigger hexies that I can sew on the machine and try my Y-seam skills. The fun part of this project is I get to use my own fabrics!!
Last year I designed a line of fabrics on Spoonflower and had a bunch of samples made. I used the samples to make my 3.75″ hexies, and that left about an inch scrap of each fabric… so I stitched them all up for a block for the back of the quilt, and LOVED how they all look together! I have set it all aside to start another project.
The newest project on my wall is a commissioned quilt for someone who recently lost a loved one. I had planned to do an improv quilt, but as I started putting fabrics together, a star emerged and I wanted to give it a good home.
So I got onto Illustrator and created a new design and then spent a day going through my fabrics for more greens. Green is the requested colorway for this quilt- I like to have a color choice and a size in mind before moving forward with a design. Then I go through my fabric stash to see what I have… and change my design accordingly. For this one, I only needed to buy one more yard of the main green fabric to make the design work, and that also will be enough for the binding.
For the lighter green background, I decided to use my scraps and cut a bunch of 3.5″ squares – the dark green, white and grey I’m keeping as solids to hold the aesthetic of the design. As soon as I got my squares lined up on my design wall, I was ready to sew! After sewing a few squares together, I realized I needed to study the layout a bit more so I could work the solid color strips to line up correctly to give it the plaid or woven look I’m going for. Learning curve! It’s kind of like a puzzle – and I’m really enjoying the process.
One of the coolest things to happen last week was having one of the Green Cross Series Quilts in the Wisconsin Journal! It is currently hanging at a show in Madison, and was featured in the entertainment section of the paper. For me, it’s such a thrill! I grew up in Minnesota, and am very familiar with the intolerance of cannabis in those states… so to have a quilt with a big ole pot leaf stitched into it featured in the paper is just mind-blowing!
Green Cross Series #3 pictured in Wisconsin State Journal:
… and look at the company my quilt is with – WOW! I wish I could have seen the show myself, the quilts I’ve seen in photos are amazing. Kudos to my friend Wendy Franczak for organizing the show Quilt Making: A Modern Practice currently on display at the Gallery At Traux, Madison College until February 19th. It is pretty wonderful to be a part of such a great show so far away, and I’m very appreciative.