Queen Mab's Tears - A HeatnBond Quilt

Hello everyone! It's Kim Lapacek from Persimon Dreams here with you today. I'm really excited to share with you a quilt I made for the Project QUILTING Thread Challenge. Project QUILTING is a fun challenge I run on my blog from January through March every year. We're already into Season 7! Every other Sunday a new challenge is posted on my blog and folks from everywhere have just one week to start and finish their quilts! Since I started these challenges in 2010 - almost 1,400 quilts have been started and finished within the challenge time frame of one week. It's great to see how everyone interprets the same challenge in such different ways. Let's get back to the quilt I made - Queen Mab's Tears. This is the mini quilt I made for the Project QUILTING Thread Challenge. The special thing about it is that I used Thermoweb's HeatnBond® EZ Print Inkjet Transfer Sheets to put the picture I took of Bleeding Hearts onto the quilt. We have a lot of flower gardens around our place and I like to take pictures of them blooming. Bleeding Hearts have always been some of my favorites. I printed this photo right onto the HeatnBond® EZ Print Transfer Sheets - seriously - doesn't it look spectacular? The quality was amazing! Next, I trimmed the sides down and peeled the back off the transfer sheet. I covered the transfer sheet with an iCraft DecoFoil Parchment Paper before ironing it to the fabric for my quilt. Once I had the transfer sheet ironed and secured to the fabric I pressed a HeatnBond® Light Weight Fusible Interfacing to the back of the fabric. I wanted to add interfacing for some extra stabilization for the transfer sheet during the quilting process. I added a fun fabric border to finish off the mini quilt top. The next trick was quilting it. I had no idea how quilting through the transfer sheet would work ... it has a really cool odd feeling to it. I used a variety of different Aurifil threads on my Bernina to do the free motion quilting all over this piece. It worked like a dream! You do have to go a bit slower and wipe your needle off every once in awhile. Between the light layer of SprayNBond® Basting Adhesive and the odd (but slick) texture of the transfer sheet the needle does gum up. I just wiped it off with my fingers in both direction every time I switched thread colors and had no problems. Because of the odd texture of the transfer I probably wouldn't use the transfer sheets on a bed quilt ... but definitely will use it again on a wall quilt or a purse ... ooh a purse would be a really cool way to really feature an amazing photo you've taken! I just love how vibrant the colors turned out and how well the photo turned out when printed. It was a fun experiment and can't wait to try more fantastic products from Therm O Web in my creations.