Consequences does not always mean bad things, does it?
This time I won the jackpot!
… Okay I won the random drawing because I put my creativity to use and entered the creativity challenge on Quilting … for the Rest of Us podcast.
For information on my creativity process as read by Sandy, go to the following podcast In Which We Get Creative (Again) Audio or Video.
Earlier this week (last week) I received in the mail this wonderful package which will entirely force me to be creative again.
Don’t you just love Sandy’s card in the middle? All about quilting for the rest of us. So professional!
The little cone of red/blue americana fabric at the top was a little bonus. For doing a podcast.
These fabrics are really going to stretch me because they seem to suggest (cone aside) a specific seasonal holiday.
So, I am pondering what to do with these fabrics. I am trying to reason through breaking them up or using them as a set.
Or using the fabrics in one smaller project (or two) or putting them as smaller pieces in a larger project.
The little face fabric is definitely my favorite of the four fat quarters. A quick little fussy cut on it should be interesting.
I am excited for thinking about the creativity challenge resulting project and as I come up with an answer I’ll keep you posted.
*** in other words ***
No machine piecing or podcasting this week.
Not a ton of creativity yet, but last weekend with the camera bag was enough to sustain for a little while.
I did go out and buy a little fabric of my own however.
I’m absolutely in LOVE with the striped turquoise fabric near the middle. I have been stalking the one fabric store for ‘fancy striped fabric’ to use for trims and such.
I got way too little of the turquoise fabric, so I’ll have to go back and get more when I get back downtown.
I got a great tip for the mario quilt about using fusible grid fabric, but the only such fabric the one store had was on point, not what I wanted.
I can also see the green box fabric fitting in nicely with Sandy’s fabric, in addition the orange fabric or the green striped fabric in the back.
I’ll have to see if that works. I’ll let you know!
This weekend, after the podcast, I was so tempted to playing a video game – not related to the mario project. I started to, but then didn’t enjoy it, so I got out some of my sewing stuff. I had my personal September Sunday Sew-In in my office, which was fantastic!
Sunday my nagging “product quilting mind” started getting after me, prodding me to lunge after my UFOs.
Last June, of 2009, I created this monstrosity for a camera bag.
I wore it to the local quilt guild show (before I was a member) and I was proud of it, but yet despised it at the same time.
I sorta showed it off, but I kept trying to get sympathy from others, wishing they were saying “It’s not that bad, really.”
Instead I kept getting suggestions on how to make it better.
Problems with the bag.
Camera is too loose in the bag. The bag is too big.
Unattractive bare elastic.
Liner showing through on the sides.
The straps are not evenly sewed down.
The strap is too long.
The strap sticks out in between my fabric and my lining.
The strap has unevenly sewed zig zag stitch along the sides in addition to the straight stitch which makes it look just silly.
The fabric, which was meant to be ‘fun & hip’ was described as ‘gross psychedelic flowery junk’.
A few months ago (I think memorial day weekend?), I created this little sharp, modern, clean looking bag.
Which has no straps, but I didn’t have my camera at the time of creating it, and failed to figure about how wide my camera really is. So when you go to close it, you get this following picture (taken w/ the phone camera – low quality)
As you may be able to tell, the lid does not stay closed. I was going to use black velcro on this, but with it being so short, it wasn’t going to work at all.
What I ended up doing most of the time was putting the camera in this black bag and putting both the camera and the camera bag into the larger flower fabric camera bag because it had straps.
This made no sense. But I lived with it.
In August our quilt guild had a meeting, where the speaker was a local quilting teacher who helped us create a sewing carryall. This used a different technique altogether with separate pockets instead of folding over one edge.
This really is a nice idea except you really don’t see the ‘fantastic fabric’ until you open it up. This project was wonderful and if I didn’t have a clear plastic case (with a zipper) as a sewing carryall, I would really be loving and using this more.
A few other issues.
You can’t see it, but the top two pockets are divided by three sewing lines. This would be fine for the bottom pocket, but I should have only put the middle sewing line on the middle pocket.
The bottom pocket was too tall to handle anything small (needles, seam ripper, washable glue) well
No batting or fleece in the middle and back pockets.
However, it sparked some ideas. What if I put an accent fabric right on the edge of the pockets? What if I varied the pocket size and colors a little bit more? What if I gave my strap ide another chance? A month ago I wrote down some of my ideas on how to make this carryall better.
And so this weekend, when I was looking wistfully at my original, unsatisfying camera bag, and then staring at my fabrics, I got out my seam ripper and was about to start ripping on the zig zag, but then decided to make something different instead. I started thinking about redoing the camera bag from scratch.
I melded the idea for the straps from the original camera bag, and the idea for taking a different fabric for the pockets from the sewing carryall, and my experience from making my tote bag, in addition to some blog post I saw about making a camera bag with a lens cap pocket, and created this on Sunday.
There is an extra pocket on the back (was intended for the front, but when turning the project inside out it ended up on the back and I am happy with it, so it’s staying on the back.
One more picture showing the lining fabric.
What’s cool and new about my new camera bag?
Cool, sleek, thin, good looking strap, with fusible fleece imbedded in the strap for weight.
Two pockets, one for the camera, one for 4 batteries. Unfortunately, I need this because the rechargeable batteries I tend to use do lose charge easily.
Trim on the pockets of different fabrics.
Rings I cut off of a handbag I bought from goodwill last year.
The top ring serves no purpose in closing the bag, but it v heft enough to keep the bag closed on its own.
Tabs created for the ring tab are sewn into the bag itself. Sleek.
Colors go well together.
My camera fits in it well!
This time, when I carry my camera bag, I hope to get some great comments about how good the bag looks and works. Looking forward to showing it off at work too!
This episode we are going to explore quilting on a grid using techniques I found to create a pixellated image.
The image is a copyrighted image from Nintendo, but the final composed picture will be arranged in the order of my personal decision. Due to the copyrighted nature of the original image, I would strongly caution in this case against selling the object without checking on copyright laws, which even after reading about, I still feel like I know very little. This image and project may fall under the fair use laws, in which case the copyright may not be an issue. When in doubt, consult professional help. (this post may lose some pictures if asked to take them down, I will)
Grid quilting is not equal to watercolor quilting, but close!
Darla’s steps for grid quilting are as follows.
Obtain the image.
This is hard work when playing video games.
For common images you would like to replicate, you may be able to download specific sprites.
For my practice piece, I found a site that had many sprites available to download, and saved the sprite images on my computer (right click, save target as). This site has many sprites available to download, and the site defines a sprite as a 2 dimensional image that is integrated into a larger scene. I want to eventually do an entire scene, but starting with a sprite is a good start.
If you want to make a pixellated image from a normal picture, there is also this website that can create pixellated images. It is best to get the smallest images possible and then blow it up. I have found that this program has limitations on showing adequate resolution, but wouldn’t a pixellated image be a great watercolor quilt background for applique pieces of more details?
Using photoshop 7.0 these are the techniques I used recently to foundation piece an image using a grid. Similar tactics may be able to be used with similar programs.
Free Image Editing Software Programs
Pixlr (browser-based graphic program, nothing to download)
Or go old school and create the image with online graph paper. (downloads as a pdf)
Work with the Image
It helps to be able to see the pixels. On photoshop, click on edit, preferences, grids, guides and slices.
Then check the grid like so that 1 grid line for every 1 pixel:
It doesn’t matter what color of lines, as long as it will show up on your image, it’s fine.
This will take the image with a grid, if you just opened the small image, it might not show up well. Go ahead and blow it up by pressing Control and + (the plus sign) to get the maximum amount of size.
If the grid doesn’t show up, go to view/show/grid.
Also notable, I highlighted the blue color and put it behind mario in the project.
Print the Image
To be able to print the grid on paper, I found an easy trick.
Get the image blown up as much as possible. I found the maximum amount I could see was 1600%. Make sure the grid is on.
Hit print screen. Then open a new picture (ctrl N) and then paste into the picture (ctrl v). Surround the area of the picture only, then image/crop.
Printing off of photoshop was easy when I went to file print with preview, and then adjust the scale size of the printed page by changing the 100% to something easier to see on the page.
For the rest of this tutorial, the printout is black and white (I haven’t used color ink in forever), for further color information for the project I referenced the original on the computer.
The printout does not have the grid printed on the printout. The grid trick was done for another project after printing this off. It would have made the next step easier.
If you notice I wrote with pencil across the grid and down the grid, one number for each pixel. This helps me figure out how wide the grid is a the widest portion and how tall the grid is. Again easier with a grid superimposed.
Prepare the mockup interfacing
For greater reference, and a step that might not be necessary, I copied this onto some pellon interfacing.
I purchased pellon interfacing with a one inch grid printed on one side of the fabric. Since I want to make the pixels smaller than one inch, I took my trusty ruler, a pencil, and I drew in every half inch on my grid. (not pictured)
Then I counted down 9 rows and started drawing in the grid with an ultra fine tip sharpie marker, making sure to have some scratch paper behind the marker. The marker bleeds through this interfacing, so be careful with your fabric.
This step reminds me a lot of counted cross stitch. I did not distinguish what is what color here.
Along the top and sides of my grid, I marked the numbers from my original drawing. This makes it easier to do some of the following steps.
I made sure I had plenty more of the half inch marked pellon grid pieces. This was all done at the same time I was drawing my half inch squares for the diagram above.
Prepare the strips
Make sure to draw about twice as many half inch squares from what is needed. Then cut the horizontal strips for each line of the grid. Cutting half way between the half inch blocks gives you a quarter inch seam allowance and makes things easier in the long run.
I found what helped me in creating the project was to cut and number in groups of five. My brain can only remember about five things at once, so dealing with groups of five made the project more manageable, less overwhelming, more organized.
Then I took my drawn grid with the printout, hid all the rows but the top one, then copied all my data onto the strip. I wrote the grid number on the left and then drew the left border two inches in, and then drew a vertical line every time I change colors.
For example the first row has 7 blue blocks, 4 black blocks, and 5 blue blocks, so on my strip I drew a number 1, a left vertical line, then 7 blocks over drew another vertical line, then 4 blocks over drew another vertical line with the symbol I made up for black (slash diagonal lines), then 5 blocks over, drew the last vertical line on the right side.
Pictured below is my 6th line with 2 blue, 1 black, 1 red, 1 black, 6 peach, 2 black, and then 2 blue (off screen). I later learned it was better to write the color code in the seam allowance on the top or bottom rather than on the block itself.
For optimum coverage, I cut out 1 inch strips of fabric to start with. Easy peasy. Taking my one inch strip, I cut adequate amounts of fabric lengths for the sections of my quilt strips for each color and put them in order just above my interfacing strip.
Start foundation piecing
Now I get to start paper piecing!
Take the first two fabrics. Put the first fabric just behind the interfacing so that it covers the area to be quilted, and then put the next piece of fabric directly behind it. In the following picture, I have blue directly behind the interfacing and black directly behind that piece.
I love this because I can see through the interfacing very well, and so I can waste very little fabric by giving myself a quarter inch seam allowance here. You can see that my markings are on the top of the interfacing, and this is where I am going to stitch.
Then as in true paper piecing form, I sew on the line, going just above and just below my piece. A nice, easy, short, straight line. Sew and line up on the line between first fabric and second fabric.
Now time to turn it over, cut any extra long seam allowances if necessary …
… and finger press.
Now turn over the piece to see the lines and line up the next fabric with the next sewing line between blocks 2 and 3 … and sew on and sew on …
And after a while, you’ll see a pattern emerge.
Now these are strips just waiting to be sewn together. Before sewing, press these strips on the fabric side.
Sew the strips together
Using the numbered pieces, line up the first strip with the second strip, fabric side together, interfacing side outward.
Line up the interfacing grid several points on each strip. You can see through the interfacing a little bit, and this helps things to line up vertically and horizontally.
Things that make this step easier
Have an outside border on each strip to line up.
Stick the pin right along the gridline itself.
Make sure your strips are numbered and the numbers are all on the same side of the quilt. This keeps you from having to figure out which direction the strip is supposed to be.
Make sure your strips are the same size.
Pin, pin, pin the strips together.
This picture is rows 1 & 2 sewn with row 3 pinned.
And here is what I have ‘finished’ at 10 rows.
I do not plan to remove any of the interfacing in this quilt.
I stopped here once I became evident of three things.
I knew what I was doing and I was liking the result. It’s going to work.
The red and skin tone are not correct and I can’t yet find the correct skin tone. At this stage mario needs a tan.
He’s facing backwards because i did not REVERSE the image. GO DO THIS before you print the image and save a lot of heartache.
Quilting plans are simple. To preserve the pixel nature of this quilt, I plan to quilt every half inch vertically and horizontally. This may change to just stitching in the ditch with time however, it’s going to take several hours/days/months/years to get to the quilting phase of this project. I want to make this quilt big!
Quilting on a grid folks. Now you can get over the grid lock. Welcome to pixel perfection.
Welcome to the Scientific Quilter. This blog hosts show notes for the Scientific Quilter podcast. The theme is science, math and quilting. Posts of current projects & thoughts also appear here.
I am always looking for new science & math inspired projects, or a good experiment on quilting techniques. Feel free to contact me with your ideas!
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