I was quite the crafter in my childhood, but college, graduate school, careers, marriages, several moves and general busy-ness interrupted my process. And in the meantime, technology and modern artistic tastes have marched on, progressing past my skills. I look at past projects with nostalgia, and I realize that the value of them, the story behind them, will be lost as time marches on. I have become convinced that good labels are necessary as part of quilting in the modern era. Anyone who has received an antique quilt will attest, it is infinitely more valuable in our minds if it has a story, and if the story is memorialized in the label, so much the better.
After some research, it appears that labeling will not be too tough. First, using a word processor to create the proper label, my inkjet printer, and using some kind of product meant to be a fixative for printer ink on fabric, will make the quilt washable (in theory). This will certainly be an improvement over my previously hand-written or absent labels, handwritten in indelible ink with a pen on fabric that was moving and stretching under the pen as I tried to write. The messy results were CLEARLY homemade, but not quite as polished as I'd like to think I will eventually get.
Apparently, one irons fabric onto freezer paper, fusing it together, then tapes the freezer paper to a piece of regular paper that will be fed through the computer printer. I have Christmas plans to follow through with, but I will soon be back to work on some of my projects, and with that effort, I'll start working on labeling.
I will post more about this as I experiment with it. Keep tuned. This could get messy!
