We’ve been rather busy lately with various things, among them preparing for the Austin Seven Centenary (the inspiration for the Bayeux Austins), and stitching has been thin on the ground. Still, life has not been a completely embroidery-free zone – that would never do!
One of the things I’ve been working on is getting fabrics printed for kits. A little over two years ago I mentioned this, said “watch this space”, and then forgot to write anything about it until a year later, when I discussed the three samples I’d had printed. Another year passed and I still hadn’t done anything with the samples (Whoo Me on organic calico, the Little Wildflower Garden on plain cotton, and Forever Frosty on Duchesse satin). Well, that’s not quite true. I’ve ironed them…
I was pleased with how they had turned out but there was the question of size. The fabric is 140cm wide, so it would be really convenient if I could print 14cm squares; but I usually cut the kit fabric to about 15cm, as I like to make sure there is enough to use comfortably with a 4″ hoop. I cut Whoo Me to size and tried it. Fortunately it works.
One of the things I hadn’t thought through properly before getting the samples printed was the design lines. These need to be black and relatively thick when I’m printing paper templates for transfers using the lightbox, but they look far too stark on the fabric – any lines not completely covered in stitching would show up quite clearly. More samples were needed, with grey lines this time. I went for a Butterfly Wreath on calico, another Wildflower garden (with a slightly darker background) on plain cotton, and as an experiment a small Hope rainbow with design lines in white on a printed denim background.
The grey lines definitely looked much better than the stark black – that is obviously the way to go. But there were two snags, one of my own making, one not. The one of my own making was the denim background. As I described in the previous fabric sample FoF, the fabrics are all either natural or white so any background colour has to be printed as well. I had photographed the fabric I’ve been using for the mini Hopes and used that as a background, but clearly the lighting had not been equal across the fabric when I took the picture – you can see that the bottom of the square is much darker than the top. The other snag was this:
There must have been something on the fabric, a little bit of loose fibre perhaps, which took the dye and then came off. It’s not a large fleck of white, but it is noticeable, and I would not be able to use this fabric in a kit. I wrote to the company to ask how common an occurrence this was; after all, if it happens once on a printed metre I could just use that square for demonstration purposes. But if it is more likely and I’d have to discard several squares, the average coast of the usable squares would get rather too high. They wrote back and explained that it was more likely to occur on some fabrics than others, and suggested a different fabric. So now another set of samples is being printed. Another Wildflower Garden with yet another slightly different background blue, a Hope rainbow using a new denim photograph as a background, and (because they had a 3-for-2 offer on swatches) a Shisha Tile on printed light yellow, all on this recommended fabric. I can’t show you the result yet, but below are small versions of the files they will be printed from. I’m looking forward to seeing how they turn out.
Another development I am considering for our range of kits is to present all of them in boxes. At the moment it is only the Goldwork Flowers & Bee, the Quatrefoil and the appliqué Mug That Cheers which come in a box; all the others come in a grip seal bag. These are lighter to send, but not as sturdy. However, as I will need to completely redesign the layout of the instructions (in booklet form rather than on loose A4 pages) this will have to wait until time is not in quite such short supply. But I’m excited about getting our kits to look their very best !