Now that I have solved my water temperature issues, I have started dyeing fabric for my latest quilt. It is a rainbow colored baby quilt.

It would be better if it was a little warmer. Since the studio is separate from the house, I hate to spend money to heat an empty room with fabric sitting in it. I decided to use the heating pad and just let the fabric soak longer.

The result is slightly less color depth than I like, but I am pleased with the result and am happy that i didn’t have to spend extra electricity to get something I liked.

!!CAUTION!!    !!CAUTION!!     !!CAUTION!!     !!CAUTION!!   !!CAUTION!!    !!CAUTION!!

Increasing your water heater temperature can be very dangerous. Please make sure that every person in your household is aware that you have increased your hot water temperature and does not use the water. Always return the water to a safe temperature as soon as you are finished. Always use appropriate gloves and tools.

When I rinse my hand-dyed fabric, I need to soak the fabric in hot water. The minimum temperature is 140˚, but I prefer something closer to 170˚. This helps to remove the excess dye faster and more completely. Recently I installed an “on-demand” (sometimes called an “instant hot”) water heater in my studio: a Tagaki T-K1S. I bought this specific model because it’s rated for a max output temperature of 182˚F. That’s HOT! It worked great.

But after I replaced my studio’s old, clogged iron pipes with new copper pipes, the water pressure was better but my hot water got cooler. What happened?

On-demand water heaters work very differently than traditional “tank storage” water heaters. If you are considering getting one of these, you need to understand how they work else you won’t be able to get the hottest water possible to rinse hand-dyed fabric properly.

After some experimentation, I figured out how to get super-hot water again. Here’s how to do it:

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Due to a mis-communication I created a last minute Christmas quilt this year. December 13th we determined that we wanted to make a quilt for my sil. I thought we had ruled out the quilt for this year in favor of another gift, but it turns out I was mistaken and this was the year of the quilt. I am happy to make them. Especially when they are well received.

I have a complex of not wanting to be Aunt Clara giving the pink bunny pajamas (A Christmas Story).  I love to make things and I love to give them away, but I know that my tastes don’t always match others, so I am a cautious home made gift giver.

I spent Sunday and Monday dyeing and rinsing flannel for the quilt. I knew I wanted tans and earthy greens. I don’t do a lot of tans so I tried creating a couple of gradations. They ended up a little closer in color than I would have liked, but do to the short time frame, I was pretty pleased with them and called them good.

Monday night Bill helped me to cut the fabric into strips and then use the AccuQuilt die cut machine to cut the squares.

Since it was Bill’s sister, it was his pleasure to pick the pattern for the quilt. He wanted to create blobs of color that kind of blended into the next blob. I don’t know if we were completely successful, but we had fun and it did break me out of my symmetrical and regimented patterning. We finished laying out the squares around 11pm on Monday.

Tuesday morning I labeled the squares so that I could keep them where they were planned and set them up for chain piecing. I spent the day piecing the quilt and was finished in time for bed.

Wednesday I spent the day washing and drying the quilt to get that nice snuggley texture and remove the extra lint before the sending it out. I also created my label pocket and label.

It was shipped on Thursday. Yeah! I love how fun these quilts are to make and the ease that the AccuQuilt adds in making them. With any luck it will coordinate with the home decor.

The photo is a little fuzzy. It was a quick overhead shot while standing on a bar stool, but it had to get in the mail.

I leave tomorrow for a trip to my cousins wedding. Unfortunately last week my purse started to fall apart. I have been wanting to make one for myself so I looked through my patterns to see what would work. I settled on a pattern from a book called Quilted Bags & Purses by Mary Jo Hiney. I used fabric that I had left over from other dyeing projects so I was able to put the bag together in a couple of days. It would have been faster, but the author and I didn’t see eye to eye on the instructions. There were several places that I just could not figure out what she was talking about. Thankfully I was able to complete the bag and I am happy with the results.

I changed a couple of things when I made it this time and if I make another one I will change several more things. I love pockets, but this one has back to back pockets that don’t seem to work for me. If I put items in the outside pockets there really isn’t space for items in the inside pockets.

Finally got a picture of the in progress braided Quilt. It is now all pieced. I am pretty pleased with how it is shaping up. I am still trying to decide what material I will use for the backing and my quilting design. I also had some leftover fabric from the quilt that I decided to try out on a Notepad Folio pattern I picked up. The Note Taker Pattern by Pink Chalk Studio was fun to make and really gives a professional appearance.

I decided that my Note Taker cover was a little boring so I pieced a few extra pieces of fabric to the cover to add some interest. I also added a polymer clay button that I created to coordinate with the fabric.

These are some quick photos taken at my recent Guild meeting.

We pushed pretty hard the last 10 days to get Mom’s quilt top mostly completed before she left. She has a little bit to go, but it is really looking great. I am a little behind mom, so I will have to play catch-up. Mom used commercial fabrics in yellows, greens and blues. She is going to have a dark blue outer border. I think it is going to look great.

Mom and I are making steady progress on our quilts. I don’t think I mentioned that we are making a French Braid quilt from the book French Braid Quilts by Jane Miller.

Mom decided that she wanted a very structured pattern for her braids so she is going to start her braids with the same color each time. I have decided to follow the book and have a more undulating pattern, but I did have to tweak what colors each of my braids were going to start with.

We spent the week sewing together our large braids. Since my colors were so close together I had to keep my fabrics labeled at all times. One of our classmates gave the suggestion to number some flower head pins and use those for labels. That was brilliant. It worked so well. I used one pin to mark each stack of fabric and a second pin in the braid I was sewing to tell me what the last color I used on a particular braid was. That allowed me to do a little bit of chain piecing. I still only worked on two braids at a time, but I think it was faster than not chain piecing.

Once I got a couple of my braids completed I decided that my small inner borders would be a very pale yellow. So, I also spent this week trying to achieve that yellow. It took me 3 tries, but I finally got the yellow I was looking for. Sorry, I didn’t take any pictures of the yellow, so you will have to wait to see it in the finished quilt top.

Today is when the fun starts. I laid out of the fabric and started to add and remove pieces until I found the combination that I liked. I decided on 14 colors to expand my quilt to queen size. In playing with the fabric I also decided that I didn’t like the gray fabric at all for the thin inner border. It was very dirty looking next to the bright yellow and greens.

I forgot to mention in my dyeing posts that my yellow accent fabric and my green outer border fabric is a white-on-white dot pattern. I like to overdye white-on-white fabrics because you get interesting results. The front is usually very high contrast and the back is very subtle.

Here is a sample of the green fabric on the front and back.

Once I decided on which greens I wanted to use I layed out the yellow accent fabric and the green border fabric. Once with the bold side up and once with the subtle side up. I decided that since my gradations were so subtle, my accents should be more subtle also. What would you have picked?

I was pretty happy with yesterday’s dye run. A couple of the shades were a little close together so I wanted to dye a couple of extra colors. I decided to dye 2 shades lighter green and 3 shades of darker green. I also decided to dye a couple of pieces of fabric the same as my current lightest green but more pale. Looking at my gradation of colors I also decided on the color for my starting triangles and outer border so I dyed that as well.

Here is today’s fabric out on the line.

Mom is coming to visit so I signed us both up for a quilting class to have a little fun. I should have looked more closely at the sample before signing up. It is almost a queen size quilt. A little bigger project than what I wanted. Oh well, I hear it is supposed to be a fast and easy quilt.

The quilt calls for half yards each of 12 colors in gradation. I decided since it was such a large quilt already, I would expand it a little and make it a queen size quilt for my guest bedroom. That room is currently being decorated in bright yellow and green, so I decided to go with a 12 step green gradation with accents of yellow.

For Day one of dyeing I dyed 12 shades of green, a gray to use as a narrow border and the yellow for the accent square.

Here is all of the fabric hanging on the line to dry.