Something new from Wonderfil!

Sometimes, when I am out and about people give me something to try. I always promise to give it a go, and, if I like it I will tell people about it. If I don’t, I keep quiet!

I have been a Wonderfil teacher for many years. Amongst other things it means I get to try new products and I can buy small quantities for designing purposes at wholesale prices. Many of you know I use Efina 60 weight thread for most of my machine quilting with pops of 12 weight Spagetti. Eleganza perle cotton in different weights is a super high quality thread for handwork, particularly when I want a lot of one color. Ellana is a wool/acrylic blend I use for wool appliqué. Invisafil is my thread of choice for English paper piecing!

When I was offered a packet of the new Rinse Away Self Adhesive Design Sheets I honestly wasn’t sure. I have tried other brands that I haven’t enjoyed working with.

Each packet has 10 sheets suitable for tracing, drawing and printing on.

I was particularly interested in being able to print on the sheets. I put just one sheet in the printer and copied my new Mola inspired design onto it. I wanted to stitch on black and it is a pain to transfer designs on to very dark fabrics. I have used transfer paper and gel pens in the past which is OK but time consuming.

The backing paper peeled off with the use of a pin to slit it (the same as I do with Wonder Under) and I stuck my design onto a square of black fabric.

The white background made the design plain to see and I started stitching.  Of course it was a little stiffer than just stitching through the fabric but I had selected quite a fine cotton so that was probably a good thing. The square got folded up in my bag at one point and the design didn’t shift or break. I was just stitching chain, fly and buttonhole stitches with a few french knots and it was easy to keep my stitches even. The needle didn’t gum up at all.

Here’s the finished piece.

The instructions said to rinse off with room temperature water. I didn’t trim the sheet at all and it took a little while to rinse everything away. I had to go back to the denser fly and buttonhole stitches to make sure nothing was left behind.

I wrung the excess water out in a towel and left it to air dry before pressing from the back like I normally do, just to finish everything off and make it all pristine.

And tada!!

Yes, I liked it.

I’m very pleased with the result. There are no silver marking lines. The stitches are all even and not distorted. This is definitely an easy way to stitch motifs on dark fabrics with minimum fuss. (If you don’t like tracing you can use it on any color fabric of course.) I think I will be using it for the outlines on future designs, removing the sheet before I fill the spaces in with extra stitches. It might be a way of giving my students more background fabric choices for some of my classes. I’m still thinking about the possibilities!

If you want to try Rinse Away Design Sheets ask at your favorite independent store or you can find them on the Wonderfil web site

** I did get my packet for free but no payment changed hands for writing this honest review!!

** The design featured here is my Mola inspired design for the AQS cruise to Panama in February next year. It will not be available to the public until after the cruise. Follow the link and you can stitch along with me while sailing around the Caribbean!