That’s the news, but we also wanted to show you what we like to do when we aren’t at the computer.

Very little of an Inklingo quilter’s time is actually spent at the computer. Inklingo quilters can sew anywhere they like!

Just a few minutes of printing makes it possible to cut and sew somewhere else—like on the front porch, or at the local ball park, or even <gasp> at the sewing machine in an air conditioned room. 

Get out and enjoy!

We have been having perfect front porch weather. Low 80s is ideal and every Inklingo shape is perfect too.

No math?

Canadians use both Centigrade and Fahrenheit. I have never been very good at converting from one to the other, but I know that 28 is 82 (C to F). That’s my kind of weather—comfortable and no tricky math.

Inklingo takes the tricky math out of quilting too, because you only need to know the finished size. 

Inklingo is even simpler than the weather forecast for beginners.

No sweat!

We thought about what quilters need to know about Inklingo.

We decided the new page for beginners should be pretty and practical.

And we made it a page on the website and a PDF, so if you want to print it out to show to your front porch friends, you can. (This is a nice handout  for Inklingo Affiliates. Use it on your blog too.)

 Highs of 27 and 28.

I forecast a few more days on the front porch this week.

Monkey says: Let’s print and go back outside. I say: Stay cool—or take a sweater, depending on your forecast. 

Don’t forget to take Tilde’s 15 Minute Challenge. It’s not just for beginners, and there will be a draw on August 1st for a $25 Gift Certificate.

Inklingo for Beginners  Love the lines. Quilt more!

Linda & Monkey

New to Inklingo? Order and download free shapes and start sewing in the next few minutes. Quick Start (Always FREE.) There are triangles, diamonds, and squares  in the free collection—great for dozens of different blocks.

There are Winners in the June Challenge!

Thank you to everyone who took Tilde’s 15 Minute Challenge in June.

We used Random.org to choose two winners from the comments left last month. The winners are:

• JaNaye in Winnsboro South Carolina
• Laura in Evans Washington

Each of you will receive a Gift Certificate for $25 by email.  You can use it for any Inklingo download.

YOU could win in July!

Your feedback about Tilde’s 15 Minute Challenge was so positive that we have decided to do it again with a draw for another $25 Gift Certificate in July.

Tilde’s 15 Minute Challengeis designed to help you print your very first shapes on fabric with Inklingo.

Anyone can enter to win (newbies and oldies) by completing the challenge (print on fabric) and leaving a comment on this post. 

The next winner will be announced on August 1st.

Click to download the Challenge here (2 pages), and get in on the fun.

When you have done the Challenge and reported your results, I think you will want to make a Tiny Tote with Tilde’s Tiny Tote pattern too—and it is FREE.

This is a Tiny Tote that Rae Ann made for Penny in 2009.

Tilde in Copenhagen has been a dear freind (that’s how Jane Austen spelled it) for over ten years, and she was one of the first three quilters to use Inklingo in 2006. She is an amazing person and I feel very lucky to know her. 

If you do the challenge today, red and white would be good, don’t you think?  The Canadian and Danish flags are both red and white.  

Tilde is the brains behind the Inklingo Sampler blog and theInklingo Projects blog too.

Whether you are a beginner or experienced Inklingo quilter, you can enter! 

The challenge was created in response to questions and  suggestions. If you have suggestions, we want to know that too. The Inklingo Yahoo group is a great place to meet.

Monkey says NOW would be a good time to do it. How can you resist?  Tilde’s 15 Minute Challenge  

It is a perfect summer day here in Burlington, and the garden is lush and colorful thanks to a rainy spring. We are feeling lucky and proud to be Canadian and to have such a wonderful way to make friends all over the world. Thank you for visiting!

Linda & Monkey

New to Inklingo? Order and download free shapes and start sewing in the next few minutes. Quick Start (Always FREE.) There are triangles, diamonds, and squares  in the free collection—great for dozens of different blocks.

Thank you to Pam Matthews in Australia! And CONGRATULATIONS on having your email published in No. 47 of Australian Quilters Companion magazine!

A dear friend wrote to alert me to Pam’s letter to the editor, which she wrote after reading a review of Inklingo in the magazine. 

Pam wrote:

“I have just bought a copy of QC#44 and eagerly looked forward to reading the road test of Inklingo, as advertised on the cover. After I had read the article, it seemed to me that a feature of the product was not covered—the fantastic ability to print your cutting and stitching lines of innumerable shapes straight onto the fabric. I have used this product and this feature allows you to quickly prepare major projects for hand or machine piecing. The pieces are really accurate and the sewing result is excellent.

“As case in point, I prepared all the hexagons and diamonds for A Legacy for Violet (QC#10-12) in a matter of hours. The quilt is now coming together beautifully. Similarly, next month I will use it to do the triangles for Five Blazing Stars (QD#43 and 44).

“Only being able to print on A4 size is not a major disadvantage or any disadvantage at all, as you choose a custom size to print depending on the size and shapes you have chosen.

“I have no affiliation with Linda Franz, but am just a very satisfied and happy quilter.

“I enjoy the projects in your magazine each month and look forward to reading other road tests in the future.”

Australian Quilters Companion “Excellence in Patchwork & Quilting” is an attractive magazine. Every issue seems to have several Inklingoable projects–although they don’t include info about Inklingo. I heard from several quilters who felt the reviewer had not actually road tested Inklingo, even though her review was positive overall.

I am delighted that the magazine published Pam’s letter. 

Won’t it be wonderful when all magazine editors realize that quilters want patterns to include information like the name of the Inklingo Shape Collection and maybe hints about custom sizes? It doesn’t take much, and quilters would start and finish more of their designs, buy more magazines and fabric, and have more fun quilting!

I am also willing to do special shape collections for magazines when they are requested.

Pam’s letter is perfection. It is great that she mentioned hand and machine piecing, the variety of shapes available, and how she has used Inklingo to make some of that magazine’s patterns. Every letter like this brings us a little closer to that goal!

THANK YOU, Pam! You put a BIG smile on my face.

NEW DRAW FOR A $25 GIFT CERTIFICATE

I’m going to keep reminding you about this. By request, we are doing Tilde’s 15 Minute Challenge again. There will be a draw for two $25 Inklingo Gift Certificates on June 30. All the details are here. Only the date of the draw is changing to June 30. The next two winners will be drawn from comments left there between May 30 and June 30.

Monkey and I are going to feed the chipmunks on the front porch this afternoon. It is always fun, as you can see from the little video we prepared last August. Happy times.

Linda & Monkey

New to Inklingo? Order and download free shapes and start sewing in the next few minutes. Quick Start (Always FREE.) There are triangles, diamonds, and squares  in the free collection—great for dozens of different blocks.

“Tilde’s 15 Minute Challenge” is designed to help you print your very first shapes on fabric with Inklingo.

You can click to download the Challenge here (2 pages), and get in on the fun! 

When you have done the Challenge and reported your results, I think you will want to make a Tiny Tote with Tilde’s Tiny Tote pattern too—and its free! 

Tilde in Copenhagen has been a dear freind (that’s how Jane Austen spelled it) for over ten years, and she was one of the first three quilters to use Inklingo in 2006. She is an amazing person and I feel very lucky to know her. 

Tilde is the brains behind the Inklingo Sampler blog and the Inklingo Projects blog too.

With credentials like that, how can you resist?

Whether you are a beginner or experienced Inklingo quilter, please take Tilde’s 15 Minute Challenge! This is going to be fun, plus there will be a draw Monday 30 May from all of the comments here and on the Inklingo Sampler blog (combined)  for two winners of  $25.00 Inklingo Gift Certificates!

The challenge was created in response to questions and  suggestions. If you have suggestions, we want to know that too. The Inklingo Yahoo group is a great place to meet.

Go! Go! Go! Tilde’s 15 Minute Challenge awaits!

Linda & Monkey

This is a happy story about a granddaughter, a grandmother, a simple idea, an irresistible request, scraps of fabric, buttons, and trims.

I think you will be able to tell how much fun this collection was to put together. Get out your fabric scraps and go see what you can do with them.

Inklingo School House has it all—a puzzle page, tips for sewing with kids, combo layouts, and of course all the shapes to print on fabric to make your houses easy to cut and sew.

This one is for you and your grandchild—or you and your inner child. Let’s play!

Linda & Monkey

New to Inklingo? Order and download free shapes and start sewing in the next few minutes. Quick Start  (Always FREE.) There are triangles, diamonds, and squares  in the free collection—great for dozens of different blocks.

Monkey and I love checklists. We use them all the time.

This is a good one for right now:

• Read this message about checklists.
• Use the checklist at the very end.

Inklingo Print Checklist

We think we need some simple Print Checklists for Inklingoists. A quick reminder makes sense for beginners and experienced Inklingo quilters.

For every quilting project, Inklingo quilters spend very little time printing compared to the time they spend sewing. A few minutes of printing can set up hours and hours of sewing fun, spread out over several days and weeks, so it can be a long time between printing sessions. 

Now you can print one page (PDF) for 3 different checklists to keep in your Inklingo binder, or stick to the front of your ordinary Inkjet printer.

For quilters who are new to Inklingo, there are detailed, illustrated printing instructions in the first Chapter of The Inklingo Handbook.

We think they are so important that we made that chapter free. Free—but it’s 48 pages. Even with Monkey’s smiling face on almost every page, quilters who are familiar with printing on fabric probably skip it.

As a monkey, Monkey says it’s only human nature to skip reading the instructions until you get in trouble. Luckily, with Inklingo, trouble is easy to avoid, and even Big Trouble is clearing a jam—not a big deal.

If you don’t want to read The Inklingo Handbook, here’s a little summary:

1. The fabric
Wash and dry the fabric so the FP will bond well enough to avoid jams in the printer.

If you fold the fabric neatly, there is no need to press until you iron on the freezer paper.

Print tests on the fabrics you will be printing to determine the best ink color. If you are machine piecing, you will probably only be printing some of the fabrics.

2. The freezer paper (FP)
Cut 2 to 5 sheets of FP and label each with the size. Each sheet can be used many times, but by cutting more than one, you can set up an assembly line for ironing and printing, peeling off and reusing sheets of FP when they come out of the printer.

Tips  Print the shapes on the paper side of one sheet of FP to check the size before cutting piles of freezer paper. When you are sure the size is right, you can cut several layers at a time. You can iron scraps of FP together to make new sheets too (details in The Inklingo Handbook, page 41, or page H41 in the downloadable version).

3. Print
Iron one sheet of FP at a time, and trim the fabric to the same size as the FP with scissors.

There are illustrations showing quick tips for preparing fabric sheets in an earlier blog entry, How to Print on Fabric Best Tips.  (17 January 2011).

Insert each fabric/FP sheet in the printer so it will print on the fabric side. Many sheets can be printed in a few minutes.

• ironed on both sides, no loose threads
• current page
• page scaling “none”
• custom size
• a glance at the Preview window before clicking print

New to custom page sizes? There are step by step instructions for entering the numbers in the print dialog box under the Support tab at inklingo.com. You will only need those instructions your first time.

 Click to download 3 Checklists (PDF).

Judging by the fun messages in the Inklingo Yahoo group this week, we may need this one too. (Most of the time we don’t want to print 899 pages, eh Mary?)

Do you think it is still a checklist if there is only one thing on it?

Here’s another checklist!

• Check out the checklists.
• Decide what you would like the Print Checklist to say.
  (Shorter than mine?)
• Decide what photo should be on it.
  (Maybe one of yours?)
• Leave a comment for me, so I know what you want.
• Spend a little time sewing every day.

We’ll use your comments to make more Inklingo Print Checklists, okay? They’ll be ready on Valentine’s Day. I hope there are lots of comments. This should be fun.

Linda & Monkey

New to Inklingo? Order and download free shapes and start sewing in the next few minutes. Quick Start  (Always FREE.) There are triangles, diamonds, and squares  in the free collection—great for dozens of different blocks.