Kauffman Designs: July Island Batik Challenge

Monday, July 29, 2019

July Island Batik Challenge

The July challenge for the Island Batik Ambassadors is called Artsy Fartsy. What a name!

This month we are highlighting Aurifil Threads. Aurifil is a co- sponser of the Island Batik Ambassador program and sends thread for us to work with in each of our Ambassador boxes. This challenge was to use at least three different Aurifil Threads in some way in our project.

I had several ideas for this project. I finally decided to make a project that would serve two purposes for me this year. One was to make this challenge project and the other was to make a quilt for the Annual Camp Mack Festival in Milford IN on Oct 5, 2019. Camp Mack is our local church camp and I always make a quilt for their live auction to benefit the camp.

This years quilt is called Becker Lodge and pays respect to a building that stood many years on the camp property.

The idea started with a postcard my husband had that he had sent to his mother from Camp in 1965. I enlarged the photo and thought I would try a project with thread embroidery.

This was a new technique for me and I wasn't exactly sure how to proceed. I'm not a fan of marking on my quilt tops, but decided to go with the blue water soluble markers. I traced the major outlines of the building on a piece of Sprinkles Island Batik fabric which is a white fabric with tiny dots.

I wasn't sure what I would use for borders, so I just made the backing and batting larger and would decide that later. I used Hobbs Thermore batting which is a very thin batting and should work well.

Here you can see I started the thread embroidery with 40 wt Aurifil.

For a slightly heavier look in the stone fireplace I used some 12 wt Aurifil thread.

I worked from one area to another adding in some detail. I first thought about thread painting all the color of the exterior of the building, but decided that would be too heavy and I didn't have the colors I thought would work. I finally decided to leave the building with just the outline- to somehow give the feel of remembering the building in the spot where it once stood.

Here are all the threads and colors I used in this project. I did try a green wool thread which I thought might make the bushes "fluffy", but found it didn't work well in the machine. What I did then was use the wool and a 40 wt thread at the same time and it worked okay for a small area.

Having never done thread painting I didn't think about using a stabilizer of any kind besides the backing and batting. It might have been helpful as I had some puckering on the right hand side because of the close quilting in the bushes. It mainly puckered on the backing behind the border area and didn't show on the front.

I wanted to have some color in the sky, but didn't want to make it heavy with thread, so I added a hint of blue to the sky with crayon. To finish it off I added a small light green Island Batik Basic called Ivy for piping and a dark green Island Batik Basic called Large Netting-Pineneedle for the borders.