WIP Wednesday: 5th Grade Raffle Quilt Continues

School Raffle Quilt On the Design Wall

I've been busy working on the 5th grade raffle quilt and I've made a lot of progress over the last few days!  We had the students' acrylic paintings scanned in at high resolution at the UPS store, and I printed them onto the EQ Printables Inkjet Fabric Sheets without any trouble at all.  I set my Epson inkjet printer to highest resolution, matte photo presentation paper, and completely filled each 8 1/2" x 11" fabric sheet with the students' artwork.  I love how clearly every detail of the artwork transferred to the fabric sheets -- brush strokes, even faint pencil lines and incomplete erasures that were visible on the original paintings. 

Peeling Away the Cellophane Backing After Printing

It was late at night when I finally finished printing all 22 sheets, so although the instructions said to let the ink dry for 15 minutes, I left mine to dry overnight before peeling away the cellophane backing.  The backing came off fairly easily, but I noticed too late that, by starting at a corner and ripping the backing away diagonally, I distorted the grain of my fabric pieces.  Next time, I would loosen the backing all along the top edge of the sheet first and then pull the backing straight down in the direction of the fabric grain to avoid having to straighten all of the fabric afterwards!

After peeling off the backing, the fabric sheets had to be soaked in distilled water for 10 minutes to rinse away any excess printer ink.  To speed this process along, I grouped my fabric sheets according to their predominate color and soaked several sheets at a time. 

Soaking in Distilled Water to Remove Excess Printer Ink

I used a white plastic dish pan, which made it easy to see that ink WAS indeed coming off into the water, so I had to dump it out and refill the dish pan every other batch or so.  I went through three gallons of distilled water by the time all of my sheets were finished.  Then I had to iron them with a bit of steam in order to remove wrinkles and straighten the grain. 

Batiks from the Stash for Framing

Although I'm mostly happy with the results of this process, the printed images on fabric look more muted and pastel than the vibrantly-colored original acrylic paintings.  In order to make sure that the quilt would capture the energy and spirit of the original artwork, I decided to frame each block with a 1" wide strip of complementary batik fabric from my stash.  The printable fabric sheets from EQ have a high thread count and a very tight weave (which enables them to capture such high resolution images) and a similar crisp hand as batiks, which makes them an even better choice for this project.

Framing Artwork Blocks with 1 1/2" CW Batik Strips

Also, since I have 22 blocks to work with, I opted to stagger the blocks with two columns of 5 and two columns of 6 blocks, offset.  This arrangement, along with the low contrast between the art blocks and the batik frames, has the added benefit of minimizing the harsh grid effect that I have seen in other school quilt projects.  The goal is that people viewing the finished quilt will notice the artwork on the fabric blocks without being distracted by my layout.

14 Down, 8 Remaining!

My design wall has been invaluable throughout this process.  First I laid out all of the artwork blocks until I had a nice, balanced arrangement, and then I was able to audition different batik frame options with the blocks before actually sewing strips in place -- which saved me from having to reach for the seam ripper and change anything that I'd actually sewn to a block.  At this point I have 14 of the 22 block frames attached, but I have selected all of the fabrics for the remaining blocks.  It takes me a lot longer to make those decisions than it does to cut the strips and sew them to the blocks.  Hopefully I will finish framing the remaining 8 blocks today and maybe even get started assembling them into columns.  I'm going to need some kind of half rectangle at the top and bottom of the two shorter columns (the ones with 5 blocks rather than 6).  At one point I thought I would use the hand marbled fabric that you see at the bottom left corner of my design wall, but now I'm leaning toward using some of the gray scribbles fabric (which you can see a strip of along the right side of the photo) that I pulled from my stash to use as backing.

Regardless, I'm looking forward to the machine quilting phase.  I'll stitch in the ditch with monofilament between blocks and in the frame seams, but then I'm planning to do some free motion quilting fills within the blocks themselves if time permits.  Finally, I'll bring the quilt to school once it's quilted so the students can sign their blocks with Pigma Micron acid-free permanent archival fabric pens.  Maybe they can even do a little surface embellishment with beading or embroidery.  I know for a fact that they all learned to do some basic embroidery stitches in a different project from last year's art class.  Gotta love a school art teacher who teaches my sons embroidery!  :-)

I'm linking up with Lee's WIP (Works In Progress) Wednesday linky party over at Freshly Pieced as well as Esther's WOW (WIPs on Wednesday), and then I'm getting back to work!

In Which I Am a Cheating Cheater Who Cheats, and Also a Crazy Person

Perfection!  But I Cheated...

 So, remember my post a few days ago when I was lamenting that this yellow applique petal came out with a crooked and overly-acute point in my first attempt at needleturn applique?  Well, I went ahead and cheated by preparing four of these petals with preturned, starched edges.  See how perfectly the petal is shaped when I do it that way in the photo above?  Knowing I could get it that accurate using the starch and press method is what made me so critical of the needle turned results.

This does not mean that I have given up on the needle turn method altogether; I was just getting antsy and wanted to get started with the actual block instead of spinning my wheels with practice samples.  So I have stitched two of the four perfect yellow petals to the coral petals so far, and I hope to complete the last two in today's carpool line and music lessons.  Then I'm going to try starching the completed units before I needle turn applique the coral petals to the larger brown petals, starching the brown fabric as well, and see whether that doesn't help reduce the distortion I experienced in my trial runs.  Another idea I had was to use the heat resistant plastic templates I made to help me finger press the edges of my applique shapes prior to stitching them down.  I've been trying to pinch along the chalked line of each shape as directed in my Piece O'Cake book, but I feel like my pinched edges come out more like a series of short lines than a smooth curve.  So maybe pinching the fabric around the edge of a curved plastic template edge will help with that.

In other news, I have officially gone stark, raving mad, and have volunteered to create a raffle quilt with my son's 5th grade class for a school fundraiser.  The completed quilt needs to be turned in to the PTO by May 1st, and we haven't started it yet.  We have 24 or 25 students, very limited class time, and no sewing machines at school.  So my idea is to have each student contribute one block to the quilt, which I will sew together and very minimally quilt or tie in order to meet the deadline.  Since there is no time to teach them all to sew, I am thinking of using those printable fabric sheets and scanning in the students' original artwork and/or photos, printing those onto the fabric, and then sewing the fabric squares together to create a quilt top.  The other idea was to have them draw on plain muslin with fabric markers, but I thought the printable fabric would probably come out better and allow a higher level of detail -- also that way the kids can work on their artwork outside of school, using whatever medium they are most comfortable with, or even contribute a drawing they have already made. 



EQ Inkjet Fabric Sheets, photo courtesy Amazon

I've never used the printable fabric sheets before.  If anyone reading this has experience with this product and can give me some tips or pointers, I would really appreciate it!  I know it has to go in the inkjet printer, not the laser.  Do I need to color set after printing with that Bubblejet stuff, and if so, how does that work?  Are some brands of fabric sheets easier to work with than others?  I see EQ, June Tailor, and even Avery make fabric sheets and the prices do vary from one brand to another, but I'm not looking to make this project more stressful by skimping on materials and giving myself a lot of extra grief!

As always, advice and suggestions are greatly appreciated.  :-)

I'm linking up with Esther's WIPs on Wednesdays linky party.  Esther is offering a beautiful Easter table runner pattern today, too -- check that out here.