October 9, 2012

Some holiday weekend sewing

Bearing in mind that I sew so-so, I have been diligently experimenting with my new sewing machine and its many many stitches. Taking a leaf out of my knitting book, which has an introduction entitled “Oh honey, keep it real simple, why don’t you?” I’m going slow.  This weekend I attempted an embellished dish cloth. Some scrap upholstery fabric served as the decoration on some plain, heavy  white cotton.

The red fabric was turned over, pressed and then turned and pressed again before being pinned to the towel for stitching.

That’s a blanket stitch  on the edge. A rather unsteady version but not too shabby considering I still expect this fancy electric machine to turn on me unexpectedly some day, like a cat getting a belly rub. WHY KITTY? WE WERE HAVING A GOOD TIME!

Anyway, the towel was then treated to the same fold, press, fold press hemming – with tidy mitred corners. If you want to know how to get nice neat corners on towel and napkins, check out this demo from Purlbee. And then voila!

A little zig-zag red on white for fun, and you can see some tentative stitching as I learned my way around getting up and over the hump of heavy layered materials. If the machine has a little trouble, I just stopped and hand-turned it through the worst two or three stitches then we were off and running again.  I do notice that using an electric foot pedal gives me a little less subtlety than when I controlled the speed with a treadle. I could make those stitches go soooo sloooow if I needed. Hulk-foot doesn’t seem to work so gently on the electric pedal, often taking off with quite a blast. It’s exciting, as I’m never sure how my fingers are going to fare. Let’s all just promise, however, that if I sew myself to something, and I tap out an SOS on the keyboard with my feet, and you cleverly understand my garbled foot typing and dispatch an ambulance, we’ll never tell Steve.

Also, to try something new, and get my fingers that much closer to the whirring machinery, I made this:

It’s a tree, if anyone is wondering Your polite silence is appreciated.