A Scrabble Label for the Drunken Dragons Quilt, and Potentially Sticky Backing Fabric

Scrabble-Style Quilt Label, Ready to Applique

I made a little progress on Lars's Drunken Dragons quilt yesterday.  I found this wonderful Scrabble fabric with 2 1/2" letter tiles, which I cut out and pieced together to spell out "MOMMY LOVES LARS."  I'm not sure if the design wasn't printed perfectly straight on my yardage or if it just got out of whack when I prewashed the fabric, but I didn't try too hard to straighten it.  This looks more realistic to me, a little bit crooked, the way the tiles really look on a Scrabble board (unless you're playing with someone who's really obsessive and straightening everything with a ruler throughout the game).

I cut the letters out individually using my smallest rotary cutter, leaving a 1/4" seam allowance for piecing them together, and then I pressed the seam allowance/extra fabric under along all the outer edges of the label.  I barely escaped that process with my fingerprints intact, by the way -- those of you who do a lot of applique, please tell me: Is there a secret to pressing the little edges under without burning yourself with the iron?  Am I supposed to be using one of those dinky baby craft irons for this?

Anyway, the plan is to machine applique the Scrabble label to the quilt backing before I layer everything together, so the label will be securely quilted in and in no danger of falling off the quilt.  That's another reason why I'm probably going to use monofilament nylon quilting thread for this project -- I wouldn't want colored quilting thread on top of this Scrabble label.  Of course I haven't experimented with the scary invisible thread yet, so that's subject to change...

After I made the Scrabble label, I pieced two widths of fabric together for the quilt backing. I chose this denim blue fabric with little white dotted swirlies and orange "fireflies" because I thought it complemented the fabrics in the quilt top, and I hoped that the busy print would help to camouflage any less-than-fabulous quilting stitches or hiccups on the back of the quilt.  However, as I was pressing the seam allowance open on my backing, I noticed that the white dotted swirlies seem to have been painted onto the surface of the fabric instead of printed like the other colors.  This is really obvious on the selvage, where they isolate each color used in the design in a little color dot., and the white "paint" covers up the 4 that was printed inside the circle.  This wouldn't have concerned me, except that I just finished reading Diane Gaudynski's dire warnings against using white-on-white fabrics for quilt backing because they often incorporate a rubbery, latex like paint in the design that grips the bed of your sewing machine and makes it extremely difficult for machine quilting.  Ugh -- did I go and find a blue version of the rubbery paint fabric?  I bought the fabric online, so I couldn't have known this before I bought six yards of it, and I didn't discover the issue until I had prewashed the fabric, seamed it together, trimmed the selvages and pressed the seam open.  This backing is ready to go, and I do like the look of it.  So, I may be crying the blues later, but I'm going to give it a go.  I'll starch the snot out of it and hopefully I won't have too much trouble with it.  If I do, I'll just have to get creative, and I've already got some ideas (like floating a piece of Sulky Solvy water soluble embroidery stabilizer under the quilt to prevent the backing fabric from sticking -- any bits of stabilizer that got stuck in the quilting stitches would just dissolve when I wash it the first time).

So, what's next?  I need to decide where exactly on the quilt backing I want to position the Scrabble label and machine applique it in place.  Since it's so big, I may also anchor the applique label to the backing by stitching through both layers along the seams between the Scrabble tiles.  I don't want the label to shift, pucker, or pleat during the quilting process.  I'm leaning toward putting the Scrabble label just off center at the top of the quilt, upside down, so that we'll see it right side up when the quilt is on the bed and the covers are turned down.  Otherwise I might put it in a corner.  Then there's a second label, the "Stitched with Love by Rebecca Deming Rumpf, 2012" and I may embroider that on the front of the quilt, along the edges of one of the outer blocks.  I still haven't done my quilting experiments, so that's a big question mark, and I have to check the washing instructions for the silk batting I purchased to see if I need to put any special care instructions on the quilt so it doesn't die the ugly death of a laundry disaster someday.  If necessary, I can embroider the care instructions to the quilt backing as well.

Lars's Kindle has been Deregistered! Take That, You Little Book Bandit!

Lars's Kindle Keyboard 3G

Ugh -- when I checked my email this morning, I was met with several new greetings from Amazon, thanking me for kindle purchases that Lars the Book Bandito was making in the wee hours of the morning, without my permission, effortlessly charged to my American Express card via my Amazon account, with the click of one button.  It wouldn't even be so bad if he was downloading books to read, but he was downloading Active Content -- mind-numbing little games to play on his Kindle instead of using it for reading. 

If you missed my previous posts about my quest to find a child-friendly eReader for Lars and Anders, you can catch up here.  I ended up purchasing the Kindle Keyboard 3G (the version without promotional advertising) for both boys, and it's working out perfectly for Anders because he doesn't struggle with impulsivity the way that Lars does.  I told him one time, "If you want a new book for your Kindle, come and ask me for permission and I'll get it for you," and for Anders, that's enough.  But Lars breaks this rule again and again, several times a week, and then I have to take the Kindle away as a punishment consequence.  It's incredibly annoying.  I didn't buy the Kindle so I would have one more thing to take away, and I didn't buy it so he could play games on it, either -- I wanted him to have a dedicated electronic reader for reading books only, something I wouldn't have to limit the way we do the iPod, Playstation and Nintendo DS games.  I bought it so he could carry a hundred books around with him wherever he goes without breaking his little back and always have something to read.  I bought it so that, when he comes to an unfamiliar word while reading, he could highlight the word and instantly get a definition without having to put the book down and go looking for a dictionary.

So I called Amazon Kindle's tech support this morning, more to share my disappointment and frustration with a captive audience than because I thought there was anything they could do about it.  The first woman I spoke with told me that there are actually parental controls for wifi access on the newest Amazon Fire Kindle, and I looked at that online briefly, but then came to my senses -- I'm beyond punishment with Lars on this issue, because yelling and confiscating the Kindle isn't working, and is unpleasant for everyone in the house, but I'm not about to reward him for his behavior by buying him a brand-new, full-color, web-surfing Kindle, either.  I called Kindle Tech Support again, and this time I spoke with a young man who suggested changing my Amazon 1-click settings and using some kind of reloadable payment card as the default payment method for the Kindles so I could put $10 a month or whatever, and when he'd used that up it would decline additional purchases.

Still not satisfied -- here's why: The Kindle is great for reading books once they are downloaded, but the Kindle Store that you access through the device is difficult to navigate, and especially difficult to browse if your objective is to find good reading material for an 11-year-old boy.  That's why Lars has downloaded so many lame, super-short books, as well as the annoying Active Content games -- they're easiest for him to find.  It's much easier for me to find books for him when I browse Amazon on my PC, where I can find Listmania lists like "best sci-fi kindle books for all ages" or even search Listmania for lists containing other titles Lars has already read and enjoyed.  So I had an ephiphany -- What if I just deregistered Lars's Kindle from my Amazon account?  Tech support guy said that all of his current content would remain, and he just would not be able to make new purchases from the Kindle device if it isn't registered to an Amazon account.  Theoretically, I can log into my Amazon account and re-register his Kindle whenever I want to purchase new content for him, and then deregister the Kindle as soon as the content has finished downloading.  I can still get new content for his Kindle from wherever we are, because I can use the Safari browser on my iPad or iPhone to reregister his Kindle from anywhere.  I'm just going to have to type in the whole serial number and everything.  So I downloaded four new books for Lars this morning, and then I cut him off from my Amazon account.  I'll let you know how it works out!

Technology Trickle-Down Takes Too Long! A Road Block for the Drunken Dragons Quilt

Keryn Emmerson design, enlarged to max hoop width, still too small for my quilt

So, here's my dilemma.  My Grand Plan for this Drunken Dragons quilt involved using the embroidery module on my Bernina Artista 200E/730E to do "in-the-hoop" decorative quilting in the center of each of the large circles, with background grid quilting to be done with my walking foot.  I was going to layer the quilt top with batting and backing, hoop a piece of stabilizer and adhere my quilt sandwich on top with temporary spray adhesive, run a basting line along the outside edge of the hoop to keep things from shifting, and then quilting a perfect decorative motif was going to be as easy as pushing one button on my sewing machine and watching the computer stitch out perfect repetitions of the selected quilting design onto each and every circle on this quilt.  The seam lines on my circles would make it especially easy to get the placement of the designs right, which is one of the biggest challenges of machine embroidery (for me, anyway). 

Keryn Emmerson design from OESD #788

I found the perfect quilting motif, too -- it's from the Oklahoma Embroidery Suppy & Design Collection 788, Quilting Inspirations by Keryn Emmerson, and it looks kind of like a blazing sun.  Perfect, right? 

My 11" Diameter Circles

Wrong!  When I sat down at the computer to enlarge this design, I selected the largest hoop that I have for my sewing machine, which is the Oval Hoop at 255 mm x 145 mm, or about 10" x 5.75".  Then I printed out a template of the enlarged design and went upstairs to "try it out" on my quilt top, as you see in the first photo of this post.  Boo, hiss!  It's WAY too small.  I guess I was thinking that the Drunkard's Path blocks I made were 7" x 7", and the circle was only a portion of that block...  It didn't dawn on me that since it took FOUR 7" blocks to make one circle, my circles were going to be larger than the maximum embroidery field of my sewing machine.  They are 11" diameter circles.

Bernina Artista 730E, photo courtesy Bernina USA

Now, it would be so much easier to just accept this and move on, and come up with a different plan, if my circles were too big to be quilted with the embroidery module on ANY sewing machine, but there's the rub: My Artista 200E computerized sewing and embroidery machine came out in 2002, and it was the top-of-the-line model at that time, but that was 10 years ago.  In 2006, when Bernina came out with the Artista 730E, I was able to pay to have my machine upgraded to the equivalent of the newest model, which is why I refer to my sewbaby as a 200E/730E.  The coolest new feature with the release of the 730 was the Bernina Stitch Regulator, or BSR Function, which facilitates even stitch length while free-motion quilting. 

Bernina 830LE, photo courtesy Bernina USA

But in 2008, Bernina came out with a beast of a new TOL sewing machine, the 830E (not to be confused with the 830 model they sold during the 1980s).  Right now they are promoting this Limited Edition version with pretty red graphics on the cover.  It's faster, it has a gigantic bobbin that holds a ton of thread, and of course the first thing you notice is that the whole machine is a lot bigger, with much more space to the right of the needle -- obviously, that's going to be really helpful to quilters who struggle to fit large quilts under the machine.  But the feature I'm most longing for at the moment is the much larger embroidery sewing field of the 730E's Jumbo Hoop, which measures a whopping 260 mm x 440 mm, or approximately 10 1/4" x 17 3/8".  If I had this machine, I could enlarge that design motif to fit my 11" quilt circles perfectly.  It's not like I can just get a wider hoop for my existing machine, either -- this is outside the limits of what my sewing machine is able to do.  Now, at an approximate retail price of $10,000, I'm not rushing out to the Bernina store to buy this machine just so I can finish Lars's quilt the way I want to do it.  That's not in the budget right now, and even if I found $10K under the sofa cushions or something (hah!) I don't think I could bring myself to spend that much on a sewing machine -- I don't even have enough time to spend sewing to justify that kind of splurge.

So instead, I'm consoling myself with the inevitability of Technology Trickle-Down.  Whatever blistering hot, bleeding edge technology is only available on the priciest models today will eventually be seen on midpriced models as well.  Over the next few years we'll even start to see this snazzy red 830LE sewbaby showing up used on eBay for a fraction of the price of a new one, so that by the time my current sewbaby is ready for retirement I should be able to step up to a sewbaby with a big, wide embroidery hoop for much less than it would cost me to make that jump today. 

Now that we've finished our pity party, what are my options for finishing this quilt using equipment that I already own?  Well, I could hand quilt the whole thing, with designs as elaborate as my heart desires, but I'm not going to do that.  For one thing, I'd like to finish this before my eleven-year-old son is ready to head off to college.  Another reason not to hand quilt it is that the variety of fabrics I used are not all suitable for hand quilting.  The batiks are a bit too stiff, and some of the other fabrics have a slightly more open weave and are not perfectly balanced thread count on the warp and weft.  As I learned from Dierdre McElroy in a hand quilting class I was fortunate to take with her a few years ago, that means it would be impossible to get consistent, even, hand quilting stitches throughout this particular quilt -- I would have evaluated each fabric for hand quilting before I used it if I was planning to finish the quilt that way.  So, no hand quilting.

I have a couple of options for machine quilting.  If I had been machine quilting for years, and was really good at it, I could just mark the design I like directly on my quilt top, drop the feed dogs, and quilt it free-hand.  I don't have the skill level to pull that off.  Another option would be to find a quarter circle design and use my Hoop-It-All Double Wide Quilter's Square to quilt each circle in four stages.  This is an expensive 3rd party hoop contraption that "tricks" my machine so that I can embroider larger designs without rehooping, with a 14 1/2" square hoop that is divided into four quadrants that slide into position and lock in place.  I'm ashamed to admit that I have never even taken this gizmo out of the box, and it must have been at least four years ago that I purchased it at a seminar.  See why I can't bring myself to fork over the ten grand for that uff da machine, no matter how wild and wonderful it may be?  I haven't had time to learn how to use half of the sewing toys that I already own!  The downsides to the Hoop-It-All solution are that I would need to spend some time figuring out how it works, for one thing, but more importantly, I would need to find a completely different design that could be stitched out in four quadrants.  My blazing sun motif has continuous lines of stitching going all the way around the circle, so that wouldn't work.

Another idea, the one I'm leaning toward at the moment, is to select a digitized embroidery quilting design that I could stitch in-the-hoop at the center of each circle, about 5 1/2" diameter with my machine's Oval Hoop, and then I would embellish and enlarge the design to fill the rest of the 11" diameter circles using free motion quilting aided by my BSR function.  I could add wavy zigzag "rays" around my blazing suns, for instance.  That way, I'm getting the speed advantage and good-looking results of the computerized quilting, but also having a chance to practice some FMQ.  After all, I'm never going to get good at it if I don't ever roll up my sleeves and just do it, right?  So, while the completed quilt top continues to languish in my studio, my next order of business is going to be threading up my sewbaby with invisible nylon monofilament thread, making up some practice quilt sandwiches, and stitching out some of these motifs to see what kind of Frankenstein hybrid quilt design I can come up with for these gigantic circles.  I'll post the results, be they good, bad, or ugly.  Wish me luck!

Happy Valentine's Day, With a Twist

I'm sorry; I couldn't resist...  I was googling to find a nice Valentine's Day image to share, just something short and sweet and lovely, and was reminded that this hearts-and-flowers holiday we're celebrating today all began with the brutal clubbing and beheading of a Catholic priest named Valentine who was martyred for performing marriages against the wishes of Roman Emperor Claudius II.  Then I stumbled upon this photo, which totally appeals to my inappropriate sense of humor.  I am also breaking a cardinal rule with this one, not linking back to the original source for the photo, because it was co-ed-something-or-other porn site.  Google, why do you take me to these nasty web sites?  All I asked for was "Valentine's Day Images!"  Thank goodness for the parental control lockdown on the kids' computer!

On that note -- HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!  I hope none of you get clubbed or beheaded.