Spring by Laura West Kong

A quilt for Earth Day! Spring was made using the Waxmelter Batik Pen, a fun and green way to use up broken crayon bits. (You wouldn’t want those broken crayons to go to waste, now would you?)

Broken crayons go in the top …

(This is the Waxmelter Batik Pen)

…melted wax comes out the bottom.

(The art comes from YOU!)

Color inside the wax-outlined shapes with thin, flowing paints such as watered-down acrylics, silk fabric paint, etc. or dip it into some cold-water fabric dye. The crayon wax acts like a resist to keep the paint where it belongs.

After the fabric dries you can remove the wax by ironing the fabric between sheets of newsprint or paper towels. The heat of the iron melts the wax and the paper soaks it up. The colored lines stay behind! Or if you’re not going to wash it, you can leave the wax right where it is. The wax lines give a neat dimensional element for an art quilt. You can melt regular batik wax, too. I’ve also decorated Easter eggs with my batik pen. Find out more about the Waxmelter Batik Pen and other wax melting tools at the Wax Melting Tools by Twisteez Wire website.

About Crayons
You probably don’t want to use those free restaurant crayons in your batik pen. Some of them got mixed up in my broken crayon box. See the difference below:

Notice the blue and green lines on the left. See the clear areas in the lines and lack of complete color coverage? That because cheap crayons don’t have as much pigment as better quality crayons do. Good crayons have more pigment and will give you bright, clear colors on paper as well as on fabric. The batik pen is easier to use with good crayons too. Sometimes the cheap crayon wax is really thin when melted and can flood out of the tip. The red and blue lines on the right probably didn’t come from children’s menu crayons. If I were to remove the wax off the samples above, the one on the left would certainly leave a greasy stain behind.

If you want some really fabulous crayons, try Prang Soy Crayons. The paraffin wax in regular crayons comes from petroleum, these are made from soy. They’re environmentally friendly, that’s why I’m telling you about them on Earth Day. But that’s not why I LOVE them … I love them because they are smooth, rich, and vibrant. They’re creamy and blend-able without a waxy buildup. I use mine for those cute vintage-y picture quilts that are hand embroidered with a stem stitch and then colored in the lines with crayons.

My Crayon Kitty. I should really finish up the rest of these blocks. Maybe I’ll make that my Earth Day project!

Share your comments or Earth Day projects!

More Eco-Posts!
Tip Tuesday: Give Blood … Get Thimbles
Muse Monday: Quilt A Memory
Bottle Cap Pincushion
Quilt Green 2009
Quilt-Cycle

While Christmas-time can be frantic and stressful, it doesn’t have to be. With a little help from our friends, we can reduce our stress and not only survive the holidays, but thrive! Here are my top ten holiday survival tips:

1. bake some Christmas cheer

There’s something special about the taste of made-from-scratch cookies, but making them doesn’t have to be an all-day affair. Gingerbread and sugar cookie dough can be prepared a few days in advance and stored in the refrigerator. Or if you prefer, uncooked dough can also be frozen for up to 9 months. Just thaw your frozen dough overnight in the refrigerator. Then enjoy a magical afternoon of cookie baking with the kids.

2. crafty decorating

If the kitchen’s not your thing, you can still have an afternoon of holiday fun with ready-to-paint Christmas tree decorations. One Christmas my daughter and I painted these mini wooden birdhouses. We still enjoy hanging them on the tree and the memories of making them together. You can also find paintable ceramic ornaments.

3. use your imagination

I have a red felt poodle skirt that I made for myself one Halloween. It doesn’t fit me very well, but the poodle skirt makes a fun Christmas tree skirt. What unusual things do you have around the house that would make unique holiday decorations?

4. personalize photo cards the easy way

If you’ve got a digital camera, chances are you already have all your family photos right there in your computer. I like to order my Christmas photo cards online because you get a wider variety of sizes and styles to choose from and you get to preview onscreen what your pictures will look like in the cards before you buy. Tiny Prints Christmas Cards even has fun die-cut designs.

Tiny Prints provides stylish, modern and unique stationery from photo cards to personalized greeting cards to thank you cards and business cards. Offering exclusive designs from the nation’s top designers, easy card personalization, a powerful preview engine and top-notch customer service and paper quality, their designs have been lauded by numerous television networks, publications and celebrities. With Tiny Prints by your side the Holidays will be a cinch! They offer adorable Thanksgiving Cards, Christmas Cards, Hanukkah Cards, and even New Years Cards. All fully customizable and personalizable.

5. craft a Christmas tradition

Crayola fabric markers are a fun way for children to create holiday mementos. How about a Christmas art quilt? Prewash 100% cotton solid white or muslin fabric, cut into the desired size squares and iron fabric squares to freezer paper (find it in the plastic wrap/tinfoil aisle), shiny side facing the fabric. This stabilizes the fabric so it’s easy to draw on. Let the kids draw Christmas pictures on the freezer paper-backed fabric, then remove freezer paper and heat set according to marker directions. Make a few new squares each year and save them up for a Christmas-art-through-the-years quilt.

6. treat yourself

In the midst of all the holiday hustle and bustle, don’t forget to take a moment or two to treat yourself. My fave is a coffee treat, but others might prefer a chocolate truffle,  a soak in a bubble bath or watching a favorite movie. Afterward you’ll be refreshed and ready to jump back into the middle of all the holiday fun.

7. kid friendly decorating

Have small children in the house? Decorate a mini tree or wreath just for them. Find party favors in their favorite theme: princess, pirate or whatever they’re into most this year. Tie them to the tree or wreath with pretty ribbons. You won’t have to worry about the decorations breaking, and after Christmas is over, pass the party favors out to your children and their friends or save them for birthday parties or small rewards in the coming year. Next year choose a new theme to decorate the mini tree or wreath with.

8. gift from the heart & hand

There are probably at least a few people on your gift list who would love a handmade present. Try a mini purse or piece of jewelry from my book, Fast, Fun & Easy Fabric Cover-Button Jewelry: Make Gifts & Glamour in an Afternoon (C&T Publishing). They really are fast, fun and easy, and with all that wonderful fabric out there to choose from, you’re sure to find the perfect print for that special someone.

9. customize a gift

Tiny Prints’ Customized Day Planners make a perfect holiday gift. There’s nothing more quick and simple to do if you already have a photo ready in your computer, and it’s a stylish and thoughtful gift the recipient will enjoy using all year long.

10. stock up for Christmas crafting

When you’re hitting the after-Christmas sales, don’t forget about holiday fabric. Pick up a few yards and stash them away. You can sew up Christmas trinkets in April, August or whenever the crafting bug bites. Then next year you’ll be ready for Christmas gift-giving, decorating or stocking a booth at your holiday craft bazaar.

What about you? Please share a holiday survival tip or two of your own.

happy beading!

A Cuppa Beads
©2010 by Laura West Kong

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Last night I was making a blue block for my Dear Diary quilt. Here is the design I pictured in my head. Actually it was originally more like 12 small squares and one large square, but I got tired of cutting and searching for that many blue fabrics so I changed it to the 4 small squares and 3 large squares shown in this illustration:

I didn’t feel like doing the math or the measurements either, so I simply guesstimated and moved to the machine to sew the pieces together. It quickly became apparent that the block wasn’t going to be big enough and it wasn’t even going to be square! Rather than start all over again I found a rectangle of polka dotted blue in my scrap box which was coincidentally exactly the size I needed and cut the cloud fabric to fit.

Here’s what I ended up with (the actual block):

I like the carefree feel of the finished block, and I love the mystery of piecing scraps together, not knowing exactly how the block will turn out till it reaches the desired size. Bonus: No stress over doing it right. Anything goes here!

Try piecing fabric scraps together sometime when you need to relax. Or sew a handful of pieces together as a warm-up before your regular quilt-making session. At the very least you’ll be warmed-up and ready to go, but you might also end up with a charming quilt top as well.

Not all of us can take off on a week-long quilting retreat, but just about everybody can carve out 10 minutes a day for quilting-related tasks. Here’s how it works:

1. Choose a quilting project to devote 10 minutes a day to. Avoid complicated patterns. You want something simple that you can jump right in and out of without getting mixed up.
2. Set aside 10 minutes each day. Schedule it in. Early in the morning works best for some people, while others prefer evening or late night. Choose a time that works for you. Don’t be afraid to mix it up once in awhile as needed. If you’re ironing the laundry one afternoon, the ironing board is set up and the iron’s hot, take advantage of that. After ironing your clothes, take 10 and press the fabric for your 10-minute project.
3. Divide the steps into short, manageable chunks and assign days to them. For example, Sunday: press the fabric. Monday: cut strips for fabric A. Tuesday: subcut units for fabric A. Wednesday: cut strips for fabric B. Thursday: subcut units for fabric B.  Friday: chain piece unit A-Bs. Saturday: press unit A-Bs. And so on. If you don’t have a dedicated sewing space set up and it takes too much time and effort to clear the dining room table and set up for just 10 minutes, then use your 10-minute days for prep work only. When you do have an afternoon or even an hour or two for quilting, you’ll be ready to jump right in and get stitching!

I’ll be the first to admit that I often hold my breath when I’m machine appliqueing or quilting a tricky section.

Take my bunny’s cottontail at left for example. I thought that breathing might somehow disrupt the smooth curves of the cottontails, so I tried to hold my breath while machine stitching around them. But holding my breath only made me rush around the circles to reach the other side before I passed out.

Turns out that slow, even breathing makes for the smoothest circles of all. Check out that yellow bunny for yourself. It was my first cottontail sewn while breathing. It beat my very best non-breathing cottontail hands down.

Try it yourself and see. About 9-10 steady, even breaths per minute works best for me for both slow and quick machine stitching.

Be patient, it might take a little bit of practice to get it right. In the beginning I sometimes found myself concentrating too hard on breathing and not enough on sewing. Keep it up and you’ll find just the right balance. With good breathing techniques I can now say that making quilts is truly relaxing after a stressful day.

I’ve got cookie cutters in traditional applique shapes like hearts and the Whig Rose, as well as whimsical animal shapes such as elephants and unicorns.

If you want your cookie cutter applique to be a two-part design like my strawberries at left, just trace around each part of the cookie cutter separately and fill in the gap after you remove the cookie cutter. See image above where I first traced the strawberry part only, then drew a line across the top to make a closed shape. Then I repeated the two steps with the leaf part of the strawberry design. Next get your iron out, fuse the two parts to fabric, cut them out, then arrange the pieces as desired and fuse them together.

Some people also like to use cookie cutters as quilting design templates. That would be a fun way to quilt a holiday quilt.

For more cookie cutter quilting fun, see my post, “Two for Valentine’s Day” where I made an edible Valentine’s Day cookie quilt.

As you can see, this very lovely Wildwood for Free Spirit/Westminster print caught my eye not once, but twice. Guess I must really like it!

Keeping a book of fabric swatches in your purse like the 3×5 card notebook pictured here (which I haven’t updated since 2003) can help you keep track of your fabric stash when you’re out shopping.

Just cut a little piece of fabric from the corner and stick it down with a glue stick. You can write any pertinent info next to the swatch such as manufacturer, date of purchase, the store, how much you bought, what you need to go with it, etc. You can also arrange them any way you wish: color, style, designer, project, and so on. This is my 30s repro swatch book.

If you’re a pre-washer, then washing and ironing your new fabric right away is one way to burn it into your memory (just don’t burn the fabric itself). Using the fabric in a quilt is another good way to help your purchases stick in your head. Alternately you could just spend a whole lot of time admiring the new fabric, but unfortunately you’re not going to make very many quilts that way.

My border is a black-on-white polka dot. As I was embroidering I was actually thinking of a multi-color African print for the border, but somehow the polka dots jumped out at me when it came time to add the border. Then I decided to quilt the border with seed beads. … Speaking of seed beads, today’s tip is about choosing batting for beaded quilt wallhangings.

Check out the detail below. There are two different batting effects at play here:

I used black wool felt as the batting for the embroidery panel. Wool felt comes in several thicknesses and many different colors. (Choose a matching felt and if the fibers beard a bit you won’t notice it.) Wool felt is easy to pull the needle through and supports the beadwork very well.

The border was an experiment. It has two layers of Warm & Natural cotton batting. This also supports beadwork well, but gives a different effect. Look carefully and you’ll see that the nylon beading thread carried between the layers creates a bit of puckering like you would get on antique quilts (and new ones as well) when the batting shrinks in the wash. If you’d like the puckered antique look, but don’t want to wash your beadwork (dyed beads can bleed in the wash), this would be the way to go. I haven’t tested this technique with a single layer of cotton batting yet, I needed the heft of two layers to support the wool felt batting in the embroidered block.

The more beads you sew onto your quilt, the more support you’re going to need, so consider all your batting options (including non-traditional ones) before you begin beading. You could even sew a handful of beads on a sample sandwich or two to test the battings out first.

Conventional beader’s wisdom say that you should always match your beading thread to your beads. That’s nice in theory and works well when you’re stitching down a lot of beads that are the same color.

However, if you’re anything like me, you can’t resist those yummy bead soup mixes. How do you match your thread to that? Are you really supposed to buy thread to match all the hues in your bead box? Even worse, imagine switching your needle and thread with each and every bead you stitch down!

Smile, beading is supposed to be a stress-reducer, not a stress-inducer. Here are some easy things you can do to save both your sanity and your wallet:

• Buy your beading thread in a few versatile neutrals such as gray for medium to dark beads and cream for light beads.
• If you’re a hand quilter (or even if you’re not), hand quilting thread is strong and works great for sewing beads onto quilts.



• Try matching (or blending, it doesn’t have to be exact) your thread to the background fabric instead.
• Go wild and use contrasting thread as a design element.

Whatever you do, have fun and just bead it!

More bead embellishment tips here ~ Tip Tuesday: Just Bead It! Sep. 22, 2009