Friday, August 18, 2006

Ironed Curtain


These are some boring pictures of ongoing projects. I am making tab curains for the window by my dinning table. I have started with osnaburg fabric, and batiked stripes with wax, then dyed light brown. Now I am ironing the wax out.

The top picture is the waxed fabric before ironing. The bottom one shows after ironing.

Next comes boiling water and Synthropol. I have a huge stock pot that I boil water in to remove the rest of the wax. You swish the fabric in the boiling water, then weight it down to the bottom of the pot while the water cools. The wax floats to the top and hardens.

I have to take the wax out because these will go in the window and get hot. Any residual wax would then soften in the heat of the sun and rub off onto other stuff. And, cat hair would stick to it.

Osnaburg may not have enough hand for curtains, so I have Stiffy to add to it after.

Here is a quilt back that I made yesterday. The top came out bigger than I thought it would, so the piece of fabric I bought for binding was too small, and I had to use some other fabric instead. The back, of course, needed a bigger piece of fabric than I bought, so I was going to take the piece I had intended for binding and add it on, but that was still to small. In the end, it has more of the fabric that I used for binding, and some pieces that I had left over from the top. Something that should have taken maybe 15 minutes ended up going on for an hour and a half.

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