When I was visiting my mom this Spring she gave me a baby quilt that my aunt had made for me when I was born. It was one that I didn’t remember from my childhood, and she explained that the first time she had washed the quilt the layers separated and the batting all came out. (When I asked my aunt about the quilt a few months later, she didn’t remember making it, but said wryly that if it fell apart it sounded like something she’d sewn.) My mom didn’t have the time to fix it with a new baby, and she had put it away and almost forgotten about it until recently. Mom’s thought was that since I was getting into quilting, I could repair the quilt and make it usable for any future kids of my own. I heartily agreed, as the quilt had the sweetest embroidered rabbits that must have taken my aunt many hours, and the border fabric was reminiscent of the late 70s in a pleasant way.

Repairing and properly finishing the quilt would be a cinch for the same reason that it fell apart. My aunt had just sewn the backing and front together and put batting inside without quilting the layers together. One of the side seams had completely unraveled, which was how the batting all came out. On the bottom were a few holes—I’m not sure what from.

The fabric itself was in excellent condition though, since the quilt had never been used. I could have just used a seam ripper to take apart the remaining three sides, but the holes required that I just trim the edges off completely (which was fine with me, since I hate ripping seams).

What I love about this project is that it only took two days, and I was able to avoid a trip to the fabric store because I had everything I needed at hand. Once I trimmed the edges, I made a proper quilt sandwich with a piece of scrap batting that happened to be the exact size I needed leftover from my mushroom quilt. The quilting was minimal because I didn’t want to mar the embroidery in any way. My batting said to quilt 4” apart, but 6” would have to do. I just quilted inside the embroidered squares and around the main border with my machine.

The binding was the biggest pain of the whole project. I was using just a fat quarter of brown fabric from my stash, so I tried the technique of piecing it all in one long strip and sewing it continuously around the quilt. (On my mushroom quilt I just used one long piece for each side, a ‘la Michael 5000’s tutorial.) The biggest annoyance with this pieced method was cutting the angled pieces, so that there wouldn’t be bulk where they joined. Once I got the hang of it, it went smoothly though, and the corners came out nearly perfect. No, the big annoyance with the binding wasn’t this method, it was that (in the spirit of my aunt) I cut corners. I really didn’t want to hand stitch the backside of the binding, so I decided to do it by machine. I thought I could use a decorative border stitch that would tie in with the embroidered borders and save me time. It was a good idea in theory, but I didn’t take into account that the fancy border stitch didn’t want to flow smoothly on my thick binding edge, and the quilt wasn’t quite square since it was all hand pieced by my aunt, so my straight lines would look wavy on the front of the quilt. I tried 3 different fancy stitches before I gave up and did straight machine stitching. In the time I spent ripping out those damn fancy stitches I could have probably hand sewn it. I’m satisfied with it now though. It looks great on the back, and the front is still a bit wavy (as you can see on the right in the above photo), but the thread color matches pretty closely, so I don’t think it’s horrible.

I am happy to report that after machine washing and drying it, it came out whole and soft and snuggly. I think it’s so cool that I get to use this 30 year old baby quilt for my upcoming baby. All of my other baby blankets from childhood were long since loved to pieces, but because this one fell apart right away, it outlasted them all. Hmm…that kind of sounds like a messed up lesson that Homer Simpson would give, doesn’t it? (Homer: Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.) Um, yeah, that’s not quite the idea I want to end with. How about: It just goes to show that even if you fumble through handmade projects and they don’t turn out perfectly, they will be loved enough to be used, saved, and recycled 30 years later. (Yeah, that’s much better!)

Sewing | 5 Comments »

My Backyard Fun fabric collection has sold well (in fact, it looks like the focal is sold out—our fabric manager told me that that bug print was the best selling open stock print since we started making fabric a year ago!), which makes me happy because that means I get to illustrate for more collections! I’m getting ready to start sketching for the one that will be released next year, which will feature woodland animals instead of bugs, so that got me to thinking about questions I’ve been asked about the process of doing Backyard Fun. I thought you fabric lovers might enjoy a visual journey of my process from sketch to fabric. It was also a good reminder for me to review the process, since I did all this work a year ago—it’s a long process!

THE SKETCH

I generally start the illustration process with a hand-drawn pencil sketch. I’ve been using a computer for over half my life, but I still find it no substitute for hand drawing. My sketches tend to be pretty rough because I know that I’ll be bringing them into the computer for clean up. This guy is my favorite character from the focal print, the fishing ant.

OUTLINING

Once I’m happy with my sketch, I scan it and bring it into Adobe Illustrator. I create vector outlines on a new layer where I want hard outlines to be and leave the rest pencil.

COLORING

With my outlines in place, I create another layer in Illustrator underneath the outlines for the color. I draw vector areas of color where I want them, just roughly guessing at the colors that I’ll want. You can see that my outlines need to be cleaned up, but I’ll get them in the next step. When I’m done coloring, I turn off the pencil sketch layer and export the file to my fabric design program.

REPEATING & FINALIZING

My fabric design software isolates the color areas, converting the file from RGB to Index color. This is necessary for screen printing. In this program, I clean up my outlines, adjust the colors and recolor some objects, create the fabric repeat by stamping down my “motifs” (of which this ant is one), and finally I add in the background texture & color. This is where I do the most work and the technical part that most fabric illustrators don’t do. (I do it because it’s my job foremost with illustration being secondary.) Once the fabric design is finished, I save off the screens and color composites and send them to our factory. It’s kind of a bummer to see how crisp this picture looks, when I know that it will have less detail and crispness on fabric. That’s just the nature of printing on woven material though.

FINAL FABRIC

Here’s a closeup photo of the same motif on the final fabric (after going through a proofing process called “strikeoff”). All of these photos have been about 200% scale. You can see that the black outlines bled out a little bit, which is the nature of dark ink. In my next collection I think I’m going to minimize the outlining more so that it’s less bold on the final fabric. It’s definitely a learning process! One thing I’ve learned about fabric printing is that the darkest color is printed first to minimize bleeding. It was so strange to think that the outlines, which look like they’re on top, are actually the bottom layer.

And that’s about it! Wish me luck on my new sketches.

Designing | 7 Comments »

Lately I’ve been enjoying the fruits of our deck garden labors. My MIL got a tip from a tomato grower at the farmer’s market not to water tomatoes after July 1 in the Northwest so that they produce. My tomato looked a little too sad when I tried that, so I’ve been watering it every other day instead. That combined with our warm weather in July has led to the leaves on our tomato shriveling pathetically, but it’s been producing like mad. The tomatoes are smaller than I was hoping (cherry size to 2”), but, hey, I’ll take what I can get!

Cooking not being one of my passions, I don’t think I’ve ever posted a recipe here before. However, this one was too delicious and photogenic to pass up. I give you: Herb Garden Guacamole.

INGREDIENTS:

-2 very ripe avocados (no they did not come from the garden, if only)
-A handful of tomatoes off the vine
-About 10 chives (I substitute these for onion, which doesn’t agree with me)
-Copious amount of fresh basil and cilantro (the cilantro was also from the store, as mine went to seed several weeks ago). Also, after eating the guacamole, I need to change “copious” to “generous”. I love basil and cilantro, but I thought the amount shown here was a tad too much. Jason disagreed.
-1 lonely Anaheim pepper (more peppers if you have them)
-A few shakes of salt and pepper (I usually ignore this in recipes, but it really does bring out the flavor in this case)
-A tablespoon of lime juice (to keep it from turning brown right away)

Chop ingredients and smash avocado with fork to blend or use the lazy method like I did and throw everything into the food processor. Serve with chips and the cerveza of your choice (I like Pacifico), unless you’re pregnant, in which case ice cold lemonade to drink is good too.

Enjoy!

Gardening, Bright Ideas | 4 Comments »

Baby knits are supposed to be quick, but it seems like this one is taking me forever. I started way back in June, but then the sample knit got in the way. I finally finished the body of the Pea Pod Sweater for baby #1, so now all I have are the sleeves and finishing. The pattern says to knit the sleeves flat and seam them in, but that’s just crazy talk. I’m sick of knitting flat, so I’m going to sew the shoulder seams, pick up around the armholes and knit them in the round. Yeah, the leaf ribbing on the cuffs will be upside down, but I don’t think the baby will notice or care.

In order to sew the shoulder seams neatly, I decided to block the piece first. Here it is after blocking:

And here’s how it will look when the shoulder seams are sewn:

I need to start looking for some good buttons. Wooden would be nice, wooden leaves would be ideal. The good news is that I still really like the Comfy yarn. In fact, while this was drying I started baby #2’s sweater, also from Comfy. I got pretty far, but then I realized that my gauge is way off, so I need to rip it out and cast on a different size. I don’t think a premie would fit in it at the size it is, and since it’s a sweater for a warm climate baby, it needs to fit in December.

Working on | 3 Comments »

If you’re a vegetarian, you might want to scroll down a bit—fair warning. It was Jason’s birthday on Sunday, so he hosted his usual birthday party barbecue. This year though he decided to make it special with the theme of eating as many different animals as we could possibly find at the stores on short notice. I made a trip on Saturday to a couple of butcher’s shops in Portland, so we ended up with 9 different animals on the menu all told (10 if you count the clams in the clam dip). On the grill was beef, chicken, lamb, buffalo, duck & quail, and in pate appetizer form was rabbit, pork & venison. The pates were delicious, and my favorite grill meat turned out to be the duck breast. I think we’ll have to go back to the butcher for more. When I told the butcher what my mission was, he was a little disappointed that he couldn’t offer stranger fare. He said with a day’s notice he could get such things as rattlesnake and frog legs—good to know for future birthday barbecues!

Here is Jason hard at work at the grill turning a quail, which was the cutest of all the animals consumed:

Later we had Jason’s traditional almond rocha cake from Beaverton Bakery.

Yes, Jason is the type of guy to order his birthday cake and make the decorator write “Happy Birthday Jason, You complete us!” on top. We all had a good laugh when we saw that.

In other news, I finally completed my dreaded sample knitting project for work. (I’ve nicknamed it the “dread project Roberts”.) I’m posting a sneak peek photo just so I can remind myself that that’s what I spent my entire July knitting.

Finishing it was such a relief that I haven’t wanted to pick up the needles in the 3 days since then. I still haven’t even started the socks I wanted to start, and now my friends’ baby has already arrived, so I need to hurry up and finish the Pea Pod Sweater.

I will leave you with a photo I took of the cats with my new macro lens that Jason got me for my birthday (what a guy!).

Photography, Finished Projects | 8 Comments »