Day 6

Today my fabric sheets arrived. YIPPEE!!! My sister had printed the graphics and pictures onto them, and after a few weeks of doing nothing regarding this project, I was VERY excited to see that package in the mailbox!!! :-)

The first thing I did was check out the colors, and they looked really nice!! It does not feel like a shirt that has been silk-screened. It just feels like the photos and graphics are a part of the fabric! I am very pleased so far!!

The fabric sheets had paper on the back, which needed to be removed. The paper is supposed to just peel off in one sheet.

However, I was rather disappointed in how much of the paper ripped and remained stuck to the fabric. In the first picture, you can see the paper ripping as I tried to peel it away from the fabric, and in the second, you can see part of the paper stuck to the back of the fabric sheet:

I tried to use water to get the back to peel off smoothly, but that was disastrous! I turned the wet sheet over and used my thumb to try and loosen up the paper that remained stuck, but all this accomplished was to run the colors on the other side of the fabric. :-(

I then tried wetting one sheet and peeling it that way. Whatever you do, do NOT try this!!! The paper did not even attempt to peel off. It simply ripped off wherever I tried to remove it:

With growing frustration, I then tried to peel the remaining paper off with my thumb keeping it dry, and this worked a little bit:

Luckily, more than 1/2 of the sheets pulled of cleanly, so I'm not sure what caused some of them to have so many problems. The goal at this point for any of the sheets with paper remaining on the back, is that when they are washed, the water will loosen up that paper, allowing it to separate from the fabric in the wash. Unfortunately, I will only have one shot at this...

In case you are wondering, the purpose for washing the material is to get rid of any chemicals and dyes on the fabric that could be harmful to the baby. In addition, it pre-shrinks the material before sewing it together, and it bleeds off the color of the photo and graphics, so the family does not have to worry about that when they wash the quilt for the first time. It also fades the color. Knowing what the colors will fade to allows me to match thread color much better, as well as will help me to pick out colors for the quilt that best match the colors of the graphics and photo.

I used one Shout Color Catcher sheet for each load of clothes, and washed them in cold water on "soft wash", keeping "like colors" together. Before I started, I remembered a problem that I had when I washed the white cotton fabric. The edges frayed off and ended up knotting the entire fabric into a ball. I had to cut all of the frayed edges off, which meant having about 1/8" less all around fabric to work with. It also caused very bad wrinkles in the fabric, that did not come out regardless of whether or not I used an iron.

Some of these fabric sheets do not have a lot of material that I can afford to waste, so I decided to do a little prep work prior to washing. I cut off as many strings as I could around the edge of the fabric to minimize fraying.

I also cut a 1/4" triangle off of each corner to prevent a string from fraying around the entire piece. My hope in doing this was to stop the fraying at each corner, saving most of the material from becoming a frayed mess. There were about 5 fabric sheets put into each load. I obviously could have fit them all in one load, but with all of the bright colors, I wanted to test in small batches. That way, if colors were to bleed, or the fabric did not hold up, I would only have ruined a few sheets (which could be redone), rather than ruining them all.

The first 2 loads were the 13 pieces of the black GT. I took the wet pieces out of the washer and inspected them. One of the sheets looked like it had a bit of bleeding:

Another sheet looked like the black car color changed to purple, green, and blue. There was another sheet in the second load that had problems with the color from wetting it when I tried to get the back off (as I mentioned above):

There were also 2 sheets with blue wheels, that looked like they should have been silver:

I was not pleased, but there was nothing I could do at this point. I threw the Color Catcher sheet out, noticing that it did not absorb much color - it remained basically white. This was odd, because I would have thought that if the colors were bleeding, these sheets would have absorbed that color and would be dark. Hmmm. I also noticed that some of the edges were quite frayed, but I believe that cutting the corners helped. Here is what a normal sheet looked like after a wash (before the frays were cut):

And this is what the worst frayed fabric sheet(s) looked like:

It just took a few minutes to cut off the frayed edges, throw away the Color Catcher sheet, and put them all in the drier.

While those sheets were drying, I started the next load, which contained the cars that will soon be appliqued to the white blocks. There didn't appear to be any major changes that needed to be made. Other than some fading of the color, there was not a lot of heavy bleeding. I was a little bit concerned with the red and white pieces, but took a chance. :-) Here is a before and after shot of the red and black GT's to give you an idea as to how much the sheets faded in the wash (not much):

One thing I would like to point out is that I had read in a few places that when drying new fabric, you should remove the sheets from the drier when they are still damp. Once they are completely dry, they have wrinkles in them that do not come out. Then, you would take the damp sheets, put them on an ironing board, and iron them flat:

I tried this both ways, and unfortunately, I had all of the same wrinkles regardless of when I pulled the sheets out of the drier - wet or dry. The good news is that with the iron, the wrinkles are quite minimal. Not to mention, the baby really will not care if his blankie has a few wrinkles in it. :-) And of course, he will be (hopefully) using the quilt - dragging it around, sleeping in it, playing on it, eating on it...

Because several pieces from the black GT looked like there was color bleeding or a change of color, I went to my saved picture, zoomed in to mimic the size I was looking at, and noticed that most of what I thought was bleeding, was actually the way it was supposed to look. It just looked odd because I had made the picture so large and it was as if I was looking under a microscope! There were 3 pieces that need to be redone, and I also noticed that I had forgotten to email 3 of the border cars to my sister to be printed. I emailed my sister the 6 pictures that I needed (which is okay because I had ordered more fabric sheets than I originally needed). I'm hoping my sister is able to print them and get them shipped back to me sometime this coming week. Between now and then, I have a lot to work on! This is the exciting part. Stay tuned!!! :-)