Last fall I fell down the rabbit hole of into the world of quilting via a project I’m working on. It took me back to Beginnings of Love, you know that feeling you get when you are super excited and start to LOVE something or someone? Well I’ve shared a bit about my trip to Quilt Market in Houston but not much about why…
Here’s the why, I’m working as a design consultant for a local company who has recently launched an exciting tool for anyone who loves creating their own textile designs! It’s called FabricMaker and it’s a commercial quality (means you can WASH it and expose it to LIGHT!) fabric printing system! I was so excited to collaborate on this project because for quite a few years now I have experimented with various image transfer and print techniques to get my photo’s onto fabric! I was not fully happy with any of the results, the fabric’s either came out faded looking, were not wash fast, would fade if exposed to light, left a residue (transfers) or involved tedious steps of soaking (pre, post etc)…ughh. In the end I kind of gave up because I didn’t think the results were worth the hassle.
Well, along came FabricMaker via a serendipitous encounter…they found Spacecraft Studio’s here in Charleston and my dear friend passed my name along to them.
Now that I’ve had some time to play with this printer and learn all about it I’ve also decided to teach myself to quilt. I have begun a sampler quilt using photo’s of flowers, foliage and other bits of nature. I hope to get this quilt done for fall quilt market but in the meantime I’ve embarked on some smaller projects.
These little mug rug’s of love were something I did for the Charleston Modern Quilt Guild February meeting. The pattern came from Here. The two are slightly different in size because the pattern was written for Die-cut pieces which I didn’t have and in the first I had to make adjustments to re-calculate…my many years of creating engineered and woven designs will serve me well in the world of Quilting! Sadly due to weather and changes in schedule I was not able to make it to the swap, so I now have two! I think they are pretty sweet and I LOVE working with my photo’s on Fabric. If you want to print your own fabric designs, check out Fabricmaker‘s systems, they are affordable, amazing quality and really have the best color saturation I’ve seen anywhere on the market!
Happy Valentines, Loves!
PS…These are the two images I used in the above projects…I didn’t create the text fabric’s but I will be making my own custom text fabric designs soon!
