On the Saturday before last, I took a machine quilting class at Quilting Adventures and got to meet fellow Cyberbee Julie. Both Julie and I had camera battery issues and a lady graciously agreed to take our picture and email it to me, but so far I haven’t seen it. So I don’t want to delay this post any longer.
The class was taught by Laura Blanchard, who designs for Red Rooster fabrics and has a line of patterns at http://www.plumtreequilts.com/. Red Rooster has all of Jennifer Chiaverini’s Elm Creek stuff and maybe because of that relationship, Laura has a quilt in one of Jennifer’s books. She teaches a lot of classes locally, I think this is the third one I’ve taken from her. She’s an excellent teacher, I heartily recommend her.
That’s me on the left side and Laura on the right. Next to her is Julie. I felt sorry for Bronwyn, next to me, as she must have been cold. She wore that coat the whole time. Can you imagine machine quilting in a coat? Peeking out behind Linda (in purple) is Phyllis, who joined the Cyberbees after I told her about us.
As I was extolling the virtues of using Crayola Washable Markers for marking designs, it was mentioned that we shouldn’t use red because there’s just something about red that doesn’t want to come out of anything. That was a good reminder that I should have done an experiment with all the colors in my box. Maybe I just got lucky with the purple one.
So I wrote on a scrap of muslin with all the colors in the box:
I didn’t stitch anything, just took the fabric to the sink and rinsed it with hot water like I’d done before with my quilting samples. The red washed out pretty easily but the one that gave me problems was the orange. I grabbed my bottle of Palmolive and washed the fabric with it. That did the trick:
Now I must tell you that to the naked eye (my naked eye anyway) all the markings are gone. But when I brought this “after” photo into Photoshop CS3 and played around with brightness and contrast, I was shocked to see that I could still (barely) read the word orange. I went back to my light box and I swear I couldn’t see it. I held it up to the window, I couldn’t see it. Although I would caution you to test any of these markers on a scrap of your fabric first, I would probably only use the orange if it was the only one I had left.
One other thing we did in class that I wanted to try at home is stitching the quilting design through paper. Laura gave us each a little piece of Golden Threads quilting paper, we marked a simple design on it with a fine line Sharpie (Laura says it’s the only pen whose marks won’t get drawn down into your fabric by the thread) and stitched. It was a fine experience but I wondered if tissue paper wouldn’t work just as well. It won’t. I tried it yesterday and it just ripped up as I went along. It wasn’t worth taking a picture, you’ll just have to take my word for it or try it yourself. 
Here is just a little sample of my class work:
