My Recipe for Pressing Solution

This stuff is great! It is cheap. It needs no refrigeration. The ingredients are easy to obtain.

To save money (to buy more fabric, of course!) I mix my own recipe and I'm very happy with it. One batch lasts me roughly one year. I mix it in a clean rinsed out gallon jug that cranberry juice came in.

I love the sensation of pressing/ironing with clouds of floral fragrance of my own choosing. The scent comes from essential oils that are sold in tiny vials in health food stores.

Some people have questioned the addition of the vodka in the mix. I believe that it acts as a natural emulsifier between the oil scent and the water-based starch. It may also be a preservative, although I've never had starch go sour or bad.

The liquid starch was purchased at my local Walmart, but some grocery stores carry it also.

I keep a second spray bottle with just plain well water which we have on tap. The plain water spray is what I use for when I am pressing/ironing fabric or blocks that will be used in one of my internet swaps. Swap rules always insist on fragrance free participation for the consideration of those poor dears who suffer from allergies. I am not afflicted so I revel in the scents. Right now I'm using attar of roses with a tiny hint of carnation.

 Due to yesterday's work helping setting up at the quilt show, I did not do any piecing. That made me sad and grouchy when I got home too tired to play. So after a good night's sleep, I ran downstairs, well, no, I hobbled gingerly downstairs, to the Quilt Cave.

I now have enough of those Civil War snowballs and nine patches to add on to make my Mr. Bojangles quilt top bigger.

I figure I need 21 blocks for a column of ten down plus eleven across. I made a couple of extra because I wasn't sure if I needed more of the snowballs or more of the 9-patches for the addition. My driveway asphalt is just a little too wet and windy from the tail end of last night's rain, so I will not likely be laying them out today.

As is my usual, I did bother to make the bonus HST's on the flippy corners that I have sewn on all these snowballs. I used some that were already pressed as leaders & enders. Hey, I got two more Ocean Waves blocks done this way! Yippee!

They sure are a finicky mess to press. I starched the everliving bejesus out of them, as my Dad would've said. Then they behave!

Before my feet and legs began to complain too much (they're such whiners!), I was able to cut the 3 1/2" blocks from their previously sewn strips.

This is for a rail fence all in greens for a community comfort quilt. Jean Vaillaincourt had the idea and she and I have been poking along on it. We have invited the guild's participation and we hope to get a good response.

Each of these little stacks are 10 or 11 blocks. The top blocks on the far right were sewn from Fat Quarters rather than Width Of Fabric yardage. I chose to sew the leftover end cuts together to squeeze yet one or two more blocks out of the FQ. It does make an internal seam in the block, but it IS a SCRAP quilt, right?