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Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Pink Mandala Quilt

Thank you, kind commenters, for your suggestions on the fabric printing. I really appreciate your taking the time to steer me in the right direction.
I went through a lot of ink trying different saturation levels, both in my digital photograph and by changing the saturation level in my printer's "advanced properties" settings. I also used different fabrics, namely cotton and silk satin.
I should add that I use an Epson 6600 home printer (which cost $100 at Best Buy a year and a half ago.) I chose the Epson because it uses pigment-based inks, as opposed to the dye-based inks that HP printers use. With the pigment inks, you just have to make sure the sizing is out of the fabric, but no other pre-treatment is necessary for permanent printing.

The top print is silk satin with the saturation in the photo upped quite a bit. This was my best print by far.
I really went through that magenta ink!
I like the silk the best...but I had already printed up a full "set" of cottons so decided to try making up this little quilt out of those. This time I added machine quilting to make the flowers puff out a bit.

It doesn't have its binding on yet.

Here's a detail. I am feeling a bit more like a "sane quilter" than a crazy quilter these days...but of course I am still insane about the flowers....

9 comments:

  1. You do have flowers in your soul!! This is elegant - even with all that pink, it is not too sweet. Good job! JAH

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  2. Your experiments are fascinating, and this quilt is beautiful. You inspired me to go out and pick some flowers to experiment with today. I tried a simple May Day arrangement. Just learning how to place them on the scanner and which fabrics to cover them with requires lots of adjustments. I started with an iris which was so fat it cast weird shadows.

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  3. oh, this is really lovely! Somehow I can't shake the feeling that ultra embellishment may be on it's way in this process. ??? :)

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  4. It's amazing the variations you can get from tweaking the printer settings and the fabric. This piece is really lovely.

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  5. The quilting makes quite a difference, doesn't it? These just keep getting nicer!

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  6. Looks good, I think. The soft colors are pretty, just not what you were originally aiming for maybe. And the quilting sets it off beautifully.

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  7. This is so lovely. Yes, those printers sure can eat up the ink fast can't they.

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  8. I hope you will like my post for "love is all around"
    http://corinaj.wordpress.com/2007/05/03/love-thursday-2/
    Corina

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  9. This is just GORGEOUS! I can't wait to see mroe!

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