June 15, 2015 Podcast
Guest: Kelsey Boes of Lovely and Enough
Topics: screen printing
She says: "People can definitely make stamps and block print pretty easily at home. And then it's also possible to make your own screens with lightweight fabric and an embroidery hoop. Then you can just cut real stencils out and squeegee the ink across the stencils and through your screen onto whatever you want."
Guest: Sue Bleiweiss
Topics: art quilts
She says: "I never cut anything until I've drawn it out. My entire process is to always start with my sketch book. I always have a rough black-and-white sketch drawing of what I think the quilt is going to look like. And then from there I actually make a full-scale drawing of the piece before I do anything. I do that because it's important for me to have an opportunity to sort of play with the imagery to make sure that the scale is right."
Guest: Juel Bagaason
Topics: donating quilts
She says: "Our blocks are 12" and usually to try to speed things up and produce more, we just do a sandwich process. We don't do the normal binding of the quilt. So then right sides together with the batting, leave about a 5" or 6" opening and then just stitch around the edge, and turn them inside out, and then pin and topstitch. We've also figured out a way to use the machine to do a star tacking method and do that about every 3-1/2" or 4" throughout the quilt vs. just hand-tying."
Guest: Siobhan Rogers of Bea Spoke Quilts
Topics: teaching quilting
She says: "My general questions are 'who is the quilt for?' and 'what has brought you here?'. Usually they want to make something imminently, like, 'I want to make a quilt and I've never made a quilt before.' So I'll find out who it's for, find out their general experience, like if they have a working sewing machine and has it been used in the last 20 years. All those sort of questions, again because if you sit down and you're ready to sew on your machine and the bobbin's not working or the tension's not right, it's not fun for me as a teacher, it takes up the rest of the class's time, and that person isn't very happy either."