Hummy Art Quilt - Into the Bathtub

It takes supreme confidence (or some other unspecified trait) to show pictures of the back of our Brazilian dimensional embroidery, or even such "personal" photos as hummingbirds taking a bath. But that's what I'm doing ...

And I feel SO like an ad for Procter & Gamble. But this is what I do when I am finishing an embroidery project, so I might as well write about it. To save wrinkling and trying to iron around a lot of dimensional flowers, I usually leave my embroidery stretched in these wooden stretcher bars when I wash out blue lines and extra floss dye.

This embroidery is fairly large, so the bathtub is the place where I'm soaking the project, and because I used EdMar rayon colors that are made with heat-sensitive dyes (especially the reds and purples, some dark greens and occasionally black), I'm using a room-temp (not hot) water soak. It will take a day or two or more; luckily, we have two bathtubs in our home!  I use Ivory liquid (any mild soap will do) and BIZ, which is supposed to help remove extra soiling. The Color Catcher sheets (by Shout) will pull out any extra color. There are other products that work just as well, though. 

     I might have mentioned that I traced the pattern onto fabric with those new metal-tip Marvey LePen wash-out pens. These are my favorite!

Sorry that photo is so large! But it's a very nice pen. EdMar (where we get our 100% rayon floss for Brazilian embroidery) carries them, as well as various merchants linked at the BDEIG website. You should have seen the "blue" that washed out right away, but it DOES come out, and that's the most important thing, to me.

     Oh, by the way -- did you notice something "different" about the photo of the little Hummy Art Quilt pictured above?  It's upside down!  I didn't notice myself until I was posting the picture and saw all those little hummers standing on their little heads.

Back to the bathtub ...

This is the second day with Color Catcher sheets pulling dye from the floss. Because the stretcher bars tend to do the back float, I've weighted the project down with nice heavy vases, trying to not mash any flowers.

By the way -- I learned something interesting from a fellow stitcher. I used to tell people to soak in cool water, and then dry the project fast with a hair dryer. Well, guess what? The hair dryer puts out HOT air -- which will make any extra dye run again.  So ... I'm going to just keep this project soaking until it doesn't run any more.

     I did that with one of my new designs -- the Ruby Slipper Orchid -- and after about a week in the water, I noticed there was no color bleed:

     I'd remind myself to not use bright reds and purples, but they are so lovely, it's worth the patient wait to soak extra dye out.

My husband just came home from an errand -- he brought me lovely red roses for Valentine's Day, a beautiful card -- AND a box of chocolates. I was going to mention that I'm dieting, but decided that I would make a Personal Attitude Adjustment and consider that chocolate is one of the Five Food Groups.

      I'll remove myself from the computer now so that I can give him HIS Valentine!