How to Use Printed Quilt Labels

More and more quilters are deciding that they have to have labels on the back of their quilt which is an awesome idea, because it's a good way to register when it was given, why it was given. And it makes our quilts just that much more heirloom. Well one thing that I have found are these labels that are in panels. And it's pretty neat because you can color on them. And so what I've done, is I have been leaving these labels out on my kitchen table and letting my kids do the coloring.

And then all I have to do is with a micron pen you know, write in, or I can embroider in whatever name or what the occasion is or whatever good wishes or good tidings that I want to put in there. But it's been really fun watching how my children have created and how each of their color ways are so different. And with this one, it's a little bit less but then you can see how they've colored around. Now, what we've used is, you do not want to use a washable crayon. You want to use the regular crayons that are wax.

If you're going to use colored pencils, you want to make sure that they as well are not a washable pencil, because we want to make sure that the colors stay in. What I do is I take a piece of wax paper and I iron it to the back and that makes it the ability to be able to color on it without it moving. And here I'll show you just with crayon. Crayon, the reason I'm showing you with crayon is because crayon tends to move the fabric more than a pencil would. Now here we have a very nice little machine.

It's just like Ruby here. So I think what I'll do is I will color her red. And of course it's not as beautiful a red as Ruby is, but we can always add more color to it. And because we're coloring on fabric, it will not be as vibrant but the color that we get will be more of an antique-ish feel to it. Now I'm also going to put a little bit of gold I think in there, if I can find a nice gold.

Oh here's a nice, here's a silver. We'll use the silver right here on the hand wheel. And I think we need a little bit of black for the belt. And you don't have to go right with whatever it is that the actual machine is. And then we can start on the quilt if we wanted to and just do a little bit of coloring in that quilt.

You know, maybe a design of colors that I'm going to do just a whole bunch of different colored blues I think. Just to give you an idea of how they each come across differently on this quilt. And you don't have to be very, very neat and tidy. You don't have to stay in the lines. You don't even have to color in every square if you don't want to.

You can go back and you can maybe duplicate in a couple areas. I think I want to try a different blue now because I don't know which one is around it. So there, now, if we want to do the flowers, I'm just going to do a couple of the flowers just to give you an idea. And then I'm going to show you how we hold those colors in place. It's a really neat technique.

You can do this with quilts as well or you can just take fabric, iron a piece of wax paper on the back of it, put it over a coloring book, find a really cool little pattern that your child might like, and then color it onto fabric and put it in a quilt. It's a really fun idea to do. So I'm going to put I think some oranges and yellows in these flowers here, and we can alternate the oranges. I think I want a deeper orange for some of it. And we'll put a little yellow in the center.

Okay, I'm not going to complete this whole project. I just want to give you a sense of how easy this is to do. When I bring my little pressing sheet over, I have as well a piece of wax paper. Now the wax side is the shiny side and that is the side that we want to put down over whatever it is that we are ironing. Be careful not to put wax paper on top of wax paper because the wax will adhere to the wax and you'll end up ripping it away.

There! Simple as that, it didn't come off on the wax paper, but what it did was it made it so that way it would become part of the fabric. So, if you want to do something fun and exciting you can make your own labels by coloring over a coloring book page and tracing it out on a piece of fabric. And then putting that wax paper on the back. Or you can go out and you can buy these panels, just leave them out on the kitchen table.

It's a great family time that you can have. And we oftentimes will just sit around and we'll all be coloring. It used to be that we would be doing puzzles, but I guess coloring has been a lot of fun in our house lately.