This week I've been determined to finish digitizing the #*)@! super-hero embroidery designs for The Granddaughter's quilt. The plan for this weekend was to begin the actual embroidering.
Twelve super-heroes, twelve 12" x 12" blocks. Before starting to embroider, I did a mock-up of the quilt using the pictures generated by my digitizing software, at which time I discovered that the twelve 12" x 12" blocks aren't nearly enough for a full-sized quilt, even with added borders. There are more super-heroes that I could do, but I AM NOT GOING TO DO ANY MORE SUPER-HEROES. This means that I will have to come up with something to fill some additional space. So I did some sound effects:
You get the idea.
In the middle of working on these things, my sister-in-law texted me a picture of a pillow she would like for me to reproduce. Doing so would involve dragging out some of the new toys that I've yet to try, and probably a lot of starting over and a lot of cussing. When I asked her when she would need it, she said it was a gift for an early April birthday. The cussing commenced.
Meanwhile, the Four Granddaughters came to visit, a welcome diversion. When I showed Granddaughter #2 the mock-up quilt, she said, "WOW! That's so cool!"
Winner, winner, chicken dinner. ;)
When the girls left, I put the first super-hero in the machine and started the embroidering. While that was happening, I pulled up the pillow picture. It was not something I could easily reproduce in embroidery; I'd have to try the new vinyl heat-press sheets that came in the mail a month ago. Using the vinyl sheet also would require a good bit of graphics editing on the computer before I could print the sheet, as I'd have to edit out the background, leaving only the design. This was a pains-taking process, but I finally accomplished it late in the afternoon. On to the printing and heat-pressing.
One of my new toys is a sublimation printer. Actually, it's just a regular printer into which sublimation ink can be dispensed. The printer came with 4 bottles of regular ink-jet ink. Those bottles have special caps that can be snapped into place on the printer tank, and the ink will glug-glug-glug into the tank. Unfortunately, the sublimation ink bottles do not have that same cap; I'd have to either inject the ink into the tanks with a shot needle - a monstrously aggravating process, I imagine - or put the sublimation ink into the ink-jet bottles. But what to do with the ink-jet ink? I hated to just pour it down the drain. Seemed so wasteful. As luck would have it, I had saved about a dozen little plastic vinegar bottles from our Blue Apron shipments. It took two of those little bottles to hold one bottle of ink-jet ink. And, of course, my hands are now technicolor from handling all these ink bottles. But I got the sublimation ink into the ink-jet bottles without spilling too much.
It was as I was snapping the last bottle onto the tank that I realized I could not use sublimation ink for what I wanted to do. The pillow fabric is 100% cotton canvas. Sublimation ink does not work well on cotton unless you treat it with something (or so I'm told), and I didn't have anything on hand to treat it with. However, I did have some vinyl sheets that could be printed with regular ink-jet ink, which I could print on one of the old printers. Having never used this vinyl, it took four tries before I got it right. First, I couldn't get the heat press machine to work right. Then, once I'd get the design pressed onto the pillow, I'd melt it up trying to "set" the design according to the instructions that came with the vinyl sheets. I decided not to "set" the 4th try. But this morning, I noticed a tiny corner that wasn't stuck well, and I screwed up again trying to set it, after all - a little bit of the ink came off. Screw it. I filled it in with a black pen. Probably not a good idea, but I'm tired of fooling with it. And I'm running low on vinyl ink-jet paper.
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