Pressing crayon to set color

I received some excellent feedback from Dottie Bailey, a quilter on the Quilting Board forum (www.quiltingboard.com), about the proper way to press the fabric and set the color after coloring it with crayons.

She said, use white towels with no texture. They need to be completely smooth or they will transfer the bumpy texture (to look like tiny dots in your crayoned shapes) and it will look…..not as good as I think it could. These tend to be the name brand, more expensive paper towels but you don’t use many sheets at a time. Also===very important—-place the towel over the page, iron well, and if the towel gets any color on it at all, which it most likely will, DO NOT reuse it. It will transfer the color from one page to another and ruin the second one.

You can also use copy paper. No problems with bumpy texture there, but you can only use each page once (like the paper towels ) because of the problems with transferring color from one page to another.

Play with a piece of fabric and a quickly colored page to test all of this and get used to it before doing the real thing. It’s not hard at all but you just have to be careful.

Dottie added that there might be a situation where a quilter might want to experiment with different textured paper towels for added effects, but probably not on one of these Bible quilt pictures.

Thank you Dottie for this very helpful information.

Bible quilts – a team effort

As much as I love the idea of making Bible quilts, and I hope and pray many will take this idea and “run with it,” I want to encourage youth leaders to think it through and have a plan for getting the final quilting done – sewing the top to the batting and backing.

And in the same breath I encourage quilters who catch this vision to step forward and offer to help the youth with this project. Perhaps a group of women might meet together on a regular basis and start a “quilting bee” for completing the quilt(s) started by the youth.