Here is the label printed in Quilting Arts and the photo of the Arno River and bridge is on the front of the quilt.

There are always loads of technical questions when it comes to printing on fabric!  Some of the questions being things like what the differences are between the types of setting chemicals and pretreated, prepared sheets, which leads to ink types and printer preferences.   Today I found a wonderful blog post on a fellow quilt artist’s blog about her experiences, old samples, preferences and technical info.  I think she did a fabulous job giving concise information and lots of it!  So I will refer you here to Gloria Hansen’s post.

I even learned a couple of things due to her working many years back on developing ways to make printer inks waterfast and lightfast before Bubble Jet Set was on the market.  I also began printing on fabric before Bubble Jet Set, but had little dye experience and was not dyeing my own fabrics then.  I used Retayne, and would probably still be doing so if Epson hadn’t developed wonderful pigmented inks which don’t need chemical setting and brought them into the home printers.

I have a love/hate relationship with my Epson R1800, but still plan to buy another Epson.  I have my eye on a newer model that I hope to get soon which will hopefully do something I have been wanting mine to be able to do, but is very limited in that capability.  It is a medium format (13″ wide) pigment based inkjet.  I have always said it needs a special button that says “Print anyway, Damn It!”  The printer wants paper to be perfectly aligned and will adjust the paper if it detects it is not perfectly aligned.  Unfortunately fabric does not have a perfect edge, hence it more often rejects my fabric than to accept it.  It has unfortunately taken too many hours to get it to print what should have taken less than an hour.  It prints beautifully and makes me so happy when it prints in an accepting manner!

Here is another label.  This one is a photo I took in Venice of gondole and was the photo used to make an original painted collage that was then printed on fabric and again painted.

I will have to do another post on how I print my labels in the future.

Looking at the Venetian photo above, I must end with,

Ciao, tutti!

Well, an empty blog… where to start…where to start… Well.  Living in Italy seems like a good place, though we are moving very shortly back to the states.  Yea!  And Awww!  Very glad to get back to the states, but very sad to leave all the beautiful sights of Italy!  We are very happy to be going into the civilian world even though I’m sure there will be some things we will miss as we are so accustomed to the military lifestyle by now.

Last week some friends and I went to a villa along the Riviera del Brenta which is the Brenta River that runs from Venice out west into the Veneto and to Padua.  It was a major trade route where the affluent of Venice had villas.  The Villa Pisani was just gorgeous and has beautiful gardens.  Unfortunately, no photos allowed inside, but I got hundreds outside.  Napoleon took control of the villa in 1807 and Mussolini and Hitler met there in 1934.  Tiepolo did amazing Trompe L’Oeil murals on the ceiling and walls of the ball room.  We all decided we would have enjoyed being able to take a bath in the very sunken tub.  I’m guessing Napoleon and Mussolini enjoyed the tub, the luxuries, and the gorgeous grounds.

We enjoyed the beautiful huge reflecting pool with a smaller lily pad filled pond at the beginning.  There are sculptures of bodies lying in the reflecting pool.  Not quite sure what to think of those.  We walked along the side path as they were cutting the grass which, along with way too much cottonwood fluff was not good for the allergies!  But we walked along that side because they were in the process of mowing over thousands of purple flowering weeds which we wanted to get some photos of before they were gone!

We continued on to a hidden treasure in the woods where there was an old buried ice house which was built up in the Napoleonic era to look like a lava flow with statues in it.  Also very odd, but fun to see what we could find.  Then we moved on to find the gazebo and I swallowed a cottonwood fluff which I highly suggest you don’t do and coughed and gagged for a good half hour!  Anyway, just a small gazebo with some pretty ironwork in the woods.

We headed on to the stables which was also used for entertaining and housing the citrus trees in the winter.  They were beautiful, but very small for as grand as they look!

Then we headed along garden after garden of beautiful flowers.  We spent the most time taking pictures of the wisteria archway, which was not yet blooming; however, the columbine at the base of the archway were stunning despite their tininess!

We unfortunately did not leave enough time to go through the shrubbery maze which is said to be the toughest in the world and has a tower at the center where you can get assistance to find the exit.  The stairs to the top of the tower are based on Leonardo di Vinci’s double helix staircase design.  Very beautiful!

There is a coffee house on a small “island” surrounded by a mote with an ice house underneath which brings cooling air into the coffee house.

The Orangery was beautiful and smelled sooooo good with the flowers blooming and citrus growing.  It is surrounded by hedges with statues along them and some statues were almost overgrown by the hedges so they looked like the statues were emerging from the hedges.

The Exedra was in the middle diving and converging the paths and was used as a lodge and gardeners quarters.  We wanted to go up the tower with spiral stairs, but they were not open because it said they were dangerous.

We all wanted to go back to take more photos, go through the maze, and see the blooming wisteria!  Time is too short for me!  Too much to see, too little time.
Villa Pisani has a website in English if you are interested in taking a look.

There [was] currently an exhibit of a Venetian impressionist painter, Emma Ciardi, that was very nice and I enjoyed her landscapes in particular.  

Well,  we are leaving Italy shortly, so this may be my one and only post until we get to the beach where I have more time on my hands waiting to see where we end up!  If I have time, I would love to tell you about some of my other travels while I soak up what little more I can during our last weeks!

Ci vediamo dopo!

The large tree in the foreground is a dark maroon leather applique.  I have been enjoying using leather in my quilts over the last year and do not feel I have finished exploring its use in quilting.

stamped and thermofax screened trees

I used the tree challenge fabric to make a similar hand carved stamp that I used with thickened dyes on hand dyed fabric, the unobstructed tree in the photo to the right. The tree on the left partially covered is a thermofax screen print and is from a photo of a tree I took in Bolzano Vicentino, Italy,  Where I lived for three years.  My sister and her husband came to visit and we decided to take a walk and found a path with a sign about an old church that led back behind houses and into a field where the church was.  The old church is utilized once a year for a communal celebration.  We enjoyed seeing the old church (look for a quilt with photos of the church in the future) and found a tree with the trunk covered in ivy.

The other thermofax screens were made with my photographs as well, one in Italy and one since moving back to the U.S.  I enjoyed using so many different techniques and exploring the use of various methods to overdye and remove color from the commercial fabrics.  You can scroll down to earlier posts as I worked on dyeing the fabrics.