All That & I Don't Get To Keep It

I finished the quilt on Wednesday night (concluding a day-long sewing marathon through a blinding migraine!) at about Midnight. It contains 34 squares that are Print Gocco images of medieval themed drawings made by K-2 kids. Each child exposed a screen, made a print, selected colors and fabrics, and machine sewed their square.

The resulting strips were sewn by me into a quilt top, quilted, and then I made binding and finished it off. Given that I've never quilted before or attempted such an ambitious project with a group of kids this feels like an accomplishment and a huge relief.

I used some of my favorite fabrics, including some Japanese Fairytale print fabric for the binding (oh, how I love you bread-heads and bottle-heads!) and even with all of the wonky sewing I am kinda sad to see this quilt go. I do have a chance to buy raffle tickets and try and win it tonight at the school auction.

It's funny that I dragged my heels and didn't really get excited about making this and now I have all kinds of ideas for my next quilt projects.

Color Riot

I am working on a quilt with 34 K-2nd Graders. They did the drawings, made prints with the Print Gocco, made color and fabric selections, and machine sewed the squares together. It's really bright, but I will temper it with some white-ish fabric. I love the drawings, from the decapitated heads to the princesses, it's all very cute.

I have just over a week to pull it all together into a finished quilt. Keeping in mind that I've never actually made a quilt, I predict some late-night crying over my sewing machine before it's all over.

Gocco Rocks!

This morning I decided to bust out the Print Gocco PG-11 that I got for Christmas (thank you husband!) a year ago. Is it possible to be scared to use something so totally simple and fun? Apparently. How silly!



Since I wasn't up for calling on my own drawing skills, I put my little artists to work. It's not always possible to commission just what you wanted from kids, and the 5 year old was resistant to the whole concept of a drawing in just black ink, but I tried to let them just do their thing.

The Gocco comes with a carbon-based black pen, and you can use that, or a carbon-based photocopy, or a carbon-based laser print for your original. You can also buy black pens at your local art supply store that are carbon-based, and we used the Pigma Micron.

So, you make the drawing, expose the screen with the Gocco flash bulbs, squirt some ink on the screen, put the screen in the Gocco, insert some paper, press down the lid, and presto! If you've ever messed around with silkscreens and photo emulsion this is a dream by comparison. So freaking easy.




I think the coolest is how the screens look, see, abstract art!





If I had planned ahead I would have bought some cardstock, but we had fun printing on copy paper and scraps of muslin. I am envisioning a massive fabric-related project and some cards for the next time around.