Charity Sewing

What projects have you been working on?  Sue has spent the last week working on a new exhibit project, however pictures can't be shared at this point, so instead she has some photos from her local guild's charity sewing day that was held Saturday.  Once a year we do an all-day sew-in to work on our two major charity projects which are preemie quilts for the Children's National Medical Center in DC and soldier/veteran's quilts.  We had over 40 participants and lots of progress was made.

There were quilts in all stages of construction, from cutting and piecing tops, laying out blocks, cutting batting, and machine quilting.

Above are 2 veteran's quilt tops that were finished.  Quilting remains to be done.

Sue chose to work on veteran's quilt blocks like the stars seen above.

Happily she was able to get faster at these as the day went on (3 before lunch, 7 after) and completed 10 blocks for the day.  Only 25 more to go to have enough for a complete top!

We had a delicious lunch of homemade soups, bread, salads and desserts.  It was a fun and productive day of sewing for all involved for good causes.

We'd love to see what you've been working on this year - one month almost gone already!  Feel free to share photos in the comments.

New Year - New (ish) Class

Happy New Year!  If you follow us, you know we've been MIA on the blog for a while.  Seems that after Houston, we got caught up in holiday preparations and Sue spent some time with her mom in PA, so it was easy to let the blog slip into the background.  But now that 2019 is here, we will try to be more consistent, though we may aim for just once a week to keep things going.  It's hard to know if anyone is reading what we post, so comments would definitely be welcome!

As mentioned in the title, we have revised our Thermofax printing class for the next session we will be teaching in February at Artistic Artifacts.  We have refined our focus to concentrate on the techniques and products that can be used to create images with Thermofax screens, and are calling the class "Thermofax Technique Sampler".  It is suitable for beginners as well as experienced printers, and even if you've taken another version of our class before, there will be some new techniques/products in this one.

We will be working with page sizes of 6 x 8 inches and each one will illustrate a different technique or product that can be used for printing.  Our list runs to 25, so we will be working diligently to get them all completed in this one day class.  When the pages are complete, they can be assembled into a book in any manner you choose.

These 4 techniques include white paint used as a resist, a 2-screen image that has an outline and fill, foil and glue, and a water-based resist.

More techniques are printing with multiple colors, using opaque paint, printing transparent paint over opaque, and printing with a combination of Inktense color blocks and matte medium.  

Here deColourant discharge product is used on 3 different fabrics to show variation.

Another discharge method uses bleach gel, again on different fabrics to show color variations.

Sue chose to print her labels on inkjet fabric and fuse them to the pages, but you can just as easily write directly on the page itself, and include more detail such as type of paint or specific product.

Here's the inside cover and first page.

And the page using foil and glue.

We have this and more in store for you so if you are near the Washington, DC area, we would love to have you join us on February 16 at Artistic Artifacts in Alexandria to learn how versatile Thermofax screens can be!