Man, Machine And Mending

Spoonflower's fabric design contest theme this week is "Sewing Celebration," so I pulled my mom's old Singer out from storage to take some pictures for an idea I had in mind.

This is the machine I learned to sew with. It was not love at first sight. Callow youth. Nevertheless, I grew to love it, and it's been showing me a good time for lo these many years. If I had more room, it would be set up all the time just to make quick work of fixing the back pockets on Bill's jeans.

Bill is a relief driver on a rural mail route, which means he sits in the passenger seat and drives with his left hand stretched to the steering wheel and his left foot on the pedals while he delivers to boxes on this right. The seat belt thing is always catching his pockets while he's twisted.

It's not difficult mending if I get to it before there's an actual hole. He's getting better at giving me a heads up before it gets to that point.

This kind of mending is not my finest work. But he's not picky.

Come to think of it, many of the qualities I love in that old Singer describe my husband, as well: Strong. Durable. Dependable. Many amazing hidden features.

And he's still showing me a good time after lo these many years.

Holiday Gift Wrap-Up #4 -- Bags For Boys

For my last post on holiday gifts I couldn't show until after surprise was taken out of the equation, I present a pair of boy gifts and a plea: One of these boys has a birthday coming up, and I need help with ideas!

You may recall that, as a maker, I find boy gifts more of a challenge than girl gifts. Never having been a boy, never having had a brother, never having lived with a teenage boy -- that all seems to makes it tougher. My gift vision is clouded with memories of what these male creatures liked when they were 5, what I see on TV, and how much I want them to love us our gifts. In other words, reality doesn't play much of a role here.


Luckily, economics does. And we don't have the money to buy safe things like gift cards. So it's simple: We have to find something to make, and it has to fit into our no-budget.

So I picked up a few extra T-shirts from the R&R bin at Bethesda (25 cents apiece). From that stash I made the two boys four drawstring stuff sacks each. I had a spool of cording on hand, but for the smaller ones I just cut strips of fabric from the T-shirts and stretched it out to make cording.

I also made each of them a 4-layer velcro-closed 2-pocket pouch. How they'll use them remains to be seen, but they were fun to make.

In just a few weeks, I'll need another boy gift for the 15-year-old's birthday. No ideas whatsoever. Suggestions, please!?! Pretty please? Hit the Comments link and tell me what you think. It won't be just me who appreciates it :)

Holiday Gift Wrap-Up #3 -- A Stretch

Like the other girl gift I showed earlier in the week, this present included a pair of fingerless mitts made from upcycled fabric. And as usual, I learned some things making in the process of making this gift.

The fabric was a polyester stretch velvet in the form of a too-small short-sleeved mock turtleneck I bought at a thrift store a while back because I liked the color. Might have paid 50 cents. My very limited experience with machine sewing on a) velvet and b) stretchy velvet convinced me to keep my plan simple.

So I cut a pair of simple mitts from the shirt using a pattern I made from lightweight non-stretchy interfacing (also thrifted, by the way).

If you look closely at the left mitt, the seam fell on the palm instead of along the outside edge of the hand. Yup, I should have cut a full-size sample from an old T-shirt or other stretchy fabric to test the pattern before I cut the velvet. Oh, well. I fiddled with the placement of the thumb hole, recut the pattern, made a sample!!, and got back to work.

There was still enough fabric to cut another pair of fingerless mittens. They're a little shorter than the pattern. That's just the way my family likes 'em.

With the rest of the fabric, I pieced together a little hat, pinning and seaming to the intact mock T, which had plenty of stretch to become a hat band. With the wonky piecing, I didn't have to worry about the nap of the fabric.

I covered the back seam of the mock T with a little fabric flower pieced together from scraps and sewn on by hand.

My older-than-me Singer never handled knits well, so I gave up sewing them years ago. My newer hand-me-down Singer doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles (and I can't drop the feed dogs), but it handles knits much better.

These mitts were hemmed with a decorative stitch. The hat was put together with zigzag stitching. I'd been fantasizing about getting a sewing machine that would make free-motion stitching easier. Now I'm kind of thinking a serger would be fun.

But for now, I can do everything I need to do with the machine I have. It's just a tool. If I didn't have a machine, I could have stitched this gift by hand.

More important than the tool is the habit of sampling: I should practice what I preach!

Sew Much Better Now

Do you find that the busier things get, the harder it is to convince yourself to do some task that will save you loads of aggravation? Not this time!

With holiday gift sewing about to reach the top of my to-do list, I took a little time last week to tick something else off the list to make it easier and more comfortable. Naturally, it took longer to gather tools and materials from Bill's shop than it did to complete the project. But the project itself was pretty simple.

My goal was to get a larger tabletop around my sewing machine. I've been using the lovely oak table my dad made for my mom when she had this machine. That table was designed to fit in a closet in their house. The small work surface meant I always fought the weight of fabric spilling off the edge of the table as I sewed.

The table I remodeled was made from plywood and a pair of folding banquet table legs bought at Fleet Farm. We've had this table at least 15 years, probably more like 20. I figured if my plan was a bust, I could always screw on a new plywood top.

So I took apart Dad's table and used the hanging shelf as a template. I traced around it, drilled holes at the corners, then cut out an opening with a jigsaw. I drilled four more holes to hang the shelf from the tabletop using carriage bolts, using four blocks of woods as spacers.

The blocks should've made the shelf hang level. But with the uneven floor in my shop, I figured I had better check. No amount of fiddling with the tightening of the bolts did the trick, so I finally just shimmed two of  the legs.

One of these days, I may take a pipe cutter to those legs and cut them all down about an inch. I'm going to sew at this height for a while before I go to that much effort. Once of these days, I may also countersink the carriage bolt heads and buff and polish the plywood tabletop. For now, I've just stapled an old tablecloth over it. The cloth covering adds too much drag, but a silicon sheet counteracts that well enough. For now.

We'll see how it goes for a while. In the meantime, I have Christmas gifts to get made. How about you: Is there some small task you could do to make the rest of your holiday gift-making less stressful?

Wardrobe Reboot

The era of cute shoes ended for me in 1998. Since then, every clothing decision I've made has been based on one thing and one thing only: "Will it go with my boots?" My footwear has to provide all-day support for my flat feet, even when I'm teaching on concrete. It can't rub on my narrow (AAAA) heels. It has to accommodate the orthotic insoles that make my legs the same length. This is the baseline for my wardrobe for practical reasons, not aesthetic ones.

Still, this is my reality. Like my weight, it's probably not going to change much. But you can see why I've been dragging my quad-A heels about a wardrobe makeover, can't you?

Last week, I quit whining and got to work. It's easier for me to keep my forward momentum if a project doesn't require a trip to town to buy anything. I pulled out a few patterns I've collected over the years, and fabric from my stash. Two pieces of yardage were given to me by a friend who was whittling her stash in preparation for a move. One piece I bought to make a dress back when I could wear dress shoes.

The dress fabric was a poly-blend crepe in a gray-blue-green seafoamy color. I made it into a pair of pants using a Burda pattern. Two or three years ago I started a muslin from that pattern, but got distracted by some other deadline and never made the necessary adjustments.

While my butchery of the fine art of pattern alteration may make some of you weep, I got the job done well enough to be decent in public.

I made two other pieces last week using two Kayla Kennington patterns. When Kayla and I first crossed paths at Sievers, she had spent the day on a plane, a car ride and a ferry and still looked fabulous and comfortable. Ever since, I've been planning to make up the Cross Over Top and Perennial Pants for myself.

The pants were so simple I could make a pair in less time than it would take me to shop for, try on and buy pants in a store. I made my trial pair from yardage I got for free, thinking I'd be happy if I just had something without holes to wear in the studio. I think they'll get an upgrade to Travel Pants when I pair them with a top made from some black linen in my stash (already ironed and ready to cut).

The Cross Over Top I made up from some drapey blue fabric (same source, also free). I think I'll go down a size next time and still have plenty of room in the hips.

I have about 10 minutes of work to finish up this top. Like the pants, it was very easy to make. I expect it to be easy to wear, as well.

I have the black linen and two other pieces of yardage ironed and ready to cut out. The timing is perfect: Bill is taking a fire department class one night a week, so that will be my night to sew.

Now that the thinking part of this wardrobe reboot is done, I think I'm over the hump. The sewing is simple compared to the procrastination.

Holiday Recycling -- Curtains & PJs Edition

Spoiler Alert: Christmas presents discussed. Proceed with caution, or be prepared to develop gift amnesia (you know who you are!).

After this morning's trip to town, I can mark four holiday gifts "done." One trip down the hardware aisle at Fleet Farm, which carries washers in two colors, and the fold-up checkerboards are complete.

These gifts began with one set of recycled cafe curtains in a heavy cotton duck. After the fabric took a dip in the indigo dye vat, I cut each panel in two to make four checkerboards. The contrast fabric is from a box of goodies my sister-in-law's bff gave me. I'm pretty sure these were pajamas at one time before they were cut up for quilting.

On the end of each board, I stitched pockets for storing the washers. And I added snap tape so the board can be folded up and secured with the washers in the pockets. Here's how they fold:

I haven't weighed them with the washers in place, but I think the weight and bulk will be just fine for canoe camping and cabin life. Since the snap tape was on a closeout, my total out-of-pocket expense for these four gifts was under $4. It will cost more to mail them than to make them, but not by much, since they're so light.

Are you making holiday gifts with recycled elements? Hit the comment button to share your ideas: I'm still pulling a blank on what to make for a couple of people!

Piecing, Harmony, And The Comfort Zone

There's a tricky balance between a) pushing yourself outside your current comfort zone and b) having everything fall apart. I've been testing that balance for the past year. I call it my Year of Living Dangerously or YOLD. At times it seems like I'm dancing down a yellow brick road, and at other times like I'm asleep in a field of poppies. Welcome to Oz, where I'm about to tear away the curtain and reveal the reality behind one of my artistic fears. I hope this story helps you find courage, too (or at least a medal that says "Courage"), and a nudge to explore the boundaries of your own comfort zone.

This year marked my 10th anniversary as a full-time, self-employed fiber artist. Ten years in, it's reasonable to expect some things to change. Challenging economic conditions effect what people are able to spend on workshops. Social media that didn't exist a decade ago has altered the way information is exchanged. And technology presents new opportunities inside the studio and outside it.

So a little over a year ago, I made a list of objectives for my YOLD. It included some stuff that was especially scary for someone who, at that time, was still on dial-up and had never seen a Facebook page. Except for "post something on You Tube," I've done pretty well with that list and my comfort zone in the digital world is much greater than it was a year ago.

To balance all the time I knew I would be spending at the computer, another major category of YOLD objectives was to spend time working with my hands in unfamiliar ways. I took a one-day blacksmithing class. I bought a spinning wheel and took a 5-day spinning workshop. I've been making friends with my sewing machine.

And this week (drum roll please), I made a pieced table runner. That may have been the scariest task of all.

Table runner made with 3 of my Spoonflower fabric designs

Maybe piecing isn't scary for you, but I've successfully resisted it for half a century. I love when other people cut perfectly good fabric into small bits and sew it together again. But I got the idea at an early age (might have been 7th grade home ec) that my seams would never be straight enough. That my measuring and cutting would never be accurate enough. That I am lacking the precision gene it takes to piece.(Ahem. This is the scary personal revelation.) That my piecing might not be perfect. And if it can't be perfect, why try in the first place?

When I recognize this kind of fear in a student, I pull up my Gentle, Supportive Instructor pants and together we get past the field of poppies. When it's only Me, Myself and I, I just blows it off. It's not like there aren't plenty of other things I could do besides piecing. But this time, Me and Myself got together to chant, "It doesn't have to be perfect." It wasn't three-part harmony, but it worked.

Quite frankly, a couple of pieced table runners isn't going to send my work in a new direction any more than a blacksmithing class did. So what's the point?

The point is, I pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone, which is more limited by perfectionism than anything else. I made something that wasn't perfect, and learned from it. My comfort zone is now a bit larger. And when the next big challenge comes in my other work, I'll remember that courage isn't the absence of fear but the willingness to take a risk anyway.

So what's at the edges of your comfort zone?

Under The Throat Plate

Earworm alert: I typed the title of this post, and now have "Under The Boardwalk" (with alternate lyrics) as the soundtrack for my day.

I'm trying to decide which is more magical -- the way a sewing machine works or the process where an animated illustration comes through the air to display on my computer screen. Thank you to Marie E of Colored Thread for a heads-up on the Tyler School of Art Fibers & Material Studies: how sewing machines work!

It must be a coincidence that during the big blow, where we expected to lose power for who knows how long, I dusted off my sewing machine. Nothing dramatic to report -- just a new work apron, a tea bag caddy for travel, a clip-on fob for my thread cutter, and I finally got some curtains shortened.

I could have stitched every one of those projects by hand and been quite content. I love the rhythm of hand stitching, even when it's something as non-sexy as straight seams. I'm trying to learn to love my sewing machine, well, if not the same way then as more than a casual friend.

Maybe it needs a pet name. When my friend Jackie Abrams got her band saw, she gave it a nice, safe name -- Mavis, I think.

Do you have a name for your sewing machine? Any suggestions on a name for mine?