Design Wall Monday: Success, Discovery and Despair

Anders Finished his First Quilt Top!

Let's start with the success.  My son Anders finished his very first quilt top yesterday!  The animal print blocks were supposed to be just a practice exercise for learning to sew straight seams, but Anders really wanted to make them into a quilt so we "stretched" them with the jungle print fabric.  The young quilter has selected lime green Minky backing fabric for this project.

So, that's the success.  Now for the disaster!

Pink Selvages?

As I was pressing my red poinsettia fabric in preparation for cutting out the setting triangles for my Jingle quilt, I noticed that this prewashed fabric yardage had PINK selvages instead of white.  At first I thought the dye in this Hoffman "Winter Magic" print fabric must have bled in the wash, but then I remembered that since I had purchased so many different fabrics for this project, I prewashed them in batches according to color.  All of my red fabrics went in together... And, now that I'm thinking about it, I realize that the most likely culprit for dye that isn't colorfast has got to be the two red batiks that are not only sprinkled throughout the pieced blocks, but also used for all of the stuffed berries and cardinals that I have been painstakingly appliqueing by hand over the past 10 months.  There is still SO much work left to do on this project, from the pieced borders and assembly of the quilt top on through the quilting, and the first thing I do with a new quilt after I finish binding it is to run it through the washing machine to remove any markings, dirt, or grime that may have accumulated during its creation.  Am I seriously going to go through all of that work, only to have red dye run all over the place and turn my off-white background fabric pink?!

I tried to remain calm.  Perhaps there was just some excess dye in the fabric initially that was rinsed away when I prewashed it?  Maybe the fabric would be okay now?  To test this, I put some boiling water into a Pyrex cup and dropped snips of the suspected culprit fabrics into the water.  Unfortunately, when the water cooled down and I removed the fabric scraps, the water was definitely pink.  Now, I would never wash a quilt in boiling hot water, and maybe the dye behaves better in cold water, but do I really want to invest another hundred hours or so before I find out?

Bleeding Bird and Berry Batiks  :-(

Here's what I decided to do.  I sewed some scraps of the offending fabrics to scraps of my off-white background fabrics.  Nothing fancy (Anders was laughing at me while I did this).  I'm going to put this little test rag into a mesh lingerie bag and put it in the wash with a load of warm laundry, and we'll see what happens. 

Ugly Test Rag

HOPEFULLY, I can use a couple of dye catcher sheets to absorb any remaining excess dye and then everything will be fine after that.  However, there is a definite possibility that either or both of these batiks will turn out to be perpetual dye bleeders that should never have been used in the first place.  All of the quilting books I have read warn you to test every single fabric before you use it in a quilt, but after testing a few fabrics and never finding a problem, I got lazy and decided that any fabric I purchased from a quilt shop was probably just fine. 

And if it turns out that one or both of these batiks or other fabrics is NOT just fine?  Well, that means hours spent with a seam ripper attempting to unpick my miniscule applique stitches without ripping through my block backgrounds, and completely remaking every single bird and berry in different fabrics, as well as taking apart and remaking every pieced block that contains these fabrics.  Hence the DESPAIR. 

The only upside here is that, by discovering the problem at this point in the project, I still have the ability to remove the offending fabric without the entire project being ruined.  I haven't been able to bring myself to wash that test rag yet, though -- I need time to emotionally prepare in case the experiment does not go well.

Meanwhile, I'm still working away at the center applique medallion, which looks like this right now:

At least I haven't made the berries for the medallion yet.

Well, I'm linking up to Judy's Design Wall Monday over at Patchwork Times, and I encourage you to check out all the other links to see what everyone else is up to this week. If anyone reading this has any suggestions about my bleeding batik dye problem, please let me know in the comments.

Happy Monday!

Mock Jingle Layout With Setting Triangles

Planned Layout for my Jingle Quilt

I need EQ7 software.  I just spent the last two hours here at the computer, trying to rearrange little thumbnail pictures of my Jingle blocks in a Word document because I don't have quilt design software.  It turns out that Microsoft Word is not an ideal software package for graphic design.  It was a glorious pain, but in the end I made it work.  What you see above (click the photo to enlarge it, so you can see the whole thing) is Erin Russek's design image for this BOM, with my own quilt blocks and red setting triangles superimposed in the arrangement that feels most balanced to me.  Then I plopped the image from the center medallion pattern in the center to see what it would look like in a straight setting.  Anyway, here's what I decided:

1.  My existing blocks are fine, and I don't need to swap out any more pieced blocks.  Once the blocks are surrounded by the red poinsettia fabric of the setting triangles, they blend together much better than they do when I look at them against the off white backdrop of my design wall.
2. I want to set my center applique medallion straight rather than an point.  I really hated the idea of giant green setting triangles around the center medallion, for one thing, and I really want to do some pieced borders with these blocks without the quilt growing to an unmanageable size.  Setting the center medallion straight should give me about 5 1/2" between the medallion and the other blocks, enough for several smaller pieced borders, and I can also do multiple pieced and plain borders in place of the wide green outer border as well.

Here is how Erin's pattern calls for the blocks to be set:

Original Pattern Designer's Layout

I think this looks great with Erin's fabric choices, but I just have not been able to find a green print fabric that I like well enough between the blocks and the medallion, and when I scroll through my Pinterest boards, I find that the sampler quilts that catch my eye again and again seem to be the ones with multiple pieced and plain borders that are scaled smaller than the blocks they frame.  Do I have the skills to get all of these borders to lay nice and flat and fit together properly?  Well, that remains to be seen.  This whole project has been a learning experience, just like every other project has been, come to think of it.  I think the pieced borders will be worth it even if I struggle with them, because I used a LOT of different fabrics in this quilt and mixing those up in pieced borders will help to tie it all together and unify the finished quilt much better than gigantic pieces of fabrics could possibly do, regardless of whether I used green solid fabric or a green print. 


Meanwhile, I'm still working on the applique hand work for the center medallion and I do have a ways to go with that.  I'm probably a good two weeks out from finishing, since I only work on it for 30 minutes to an hour each day.   Stay tuned...  :-)