Ironing Board Cover

I decided my ironing board cover needed some upgrades.

The old one, which came with the ironing board, never could seem to stay all the way on the top. 

It also had foam padding that, after many years, had gone flat, stretched, and just wasn't conforming well to the shape of the board.

The concept was to fix these issues and maybe even make things better than new.

My cousin Suzy, who is really into quilting (check out her web page here) commented that covering an ironing board with flannel was a great way to keep her complex applique pieces from stretching when ironed.  That seemed like good guidance for the type of material to choose.  I used a 100% cotton flannel.  That will stand up to any temperature I'd normally run my iron at, since I rarely work with linen.   I found a light hearted design with mermaids that suits the other colors in my sewing room.  For padding, I had some 100% batting in my stash from some forgotten project.

First, I cut the batting in the shape of the ironing board top.

Next, I cut the flannel with 2" extra around the batting.

To stop the batting from sliding under the flannel, I quilted the two together.  I didn't do anything fancy here, just used a built in stitch from my sewing machine.  I chose one that was curvy vaguely suggested waves to me.

Next, I sewed double fold bias tape all around the cover.  I included some strong string in the bias tape to use for gathering the cover on the bottom side of the board.

Installing the cover was a snap -- just put in on the board, draw the string, and tie it tight.

I've had a chance to use the refurbished ironing board an it's awesome.  Nothing ever slips and slides off my ironing board, which had been a problem sometimes.  It's got just the right amount of padding and it even fits my style.

Come back next week for more fun with a ραπτομηχανή (sewing machine)!

Whale Shark Towel

A friend asked if I could decorate a towel with the image of one of his favorite sea creatures -- the whale shark.

He already had a design, but it required a little modification to eliminate extraneous background items.   The towel came from Walmart.  I chose a blue one, because this is a creature of the open ocean.

To work with a loopy fabric like terry cloth, you need to use not just a stabilizer, but also a topper, to keep the loops matted down while you stitch.  It's also necessary to use water soluble materials, so that you can just wash them away once the embroidery is done.  I chose to use the fibrous Rinse Away Mesh from Embellish on the bottom.  This wonderful stabilizer stands up well to a lot needle punches.  On the top, I used Ultra Solvy by Sulky.  It's a lot heavier than you'd typically use for a topper, but I have plenty of it left over from other projects.  It turned out to be very helpful to use this material after I accidentally started stitching the whale shark upside down -- the heavy topper made it possible to rip out those stitches!

Here's the bottom of the embroidery hoop, with the Rinse Away Mesh.

Here's the beginning of the stitch out, showing the Ultra Solvy.

Since this embroidery will be seen from both sides, I used the same thread in the needle and in the bobbin.  This is the underside, with a few wisps of the the Rise Away Mesh still around the design.  A trip through a sink full of water made that go away.

Come back next week for a project for your sewing room!

Decorating a Fire Department

My sister is working on a decorating project at her local fire station. She asked me to create an embroidered piece with the logo and station identification that she could incorporate into a larger window shade she's making.

 The digitizing I did for the math art project taught me a lot and made this project a lot easier.

I started by finding the logo for her local fire department on their website.

As always with conversions from images to embroidery, there's choices to be made about what details to include or not include.  The red and yellow zia in the fire department symbol seemed important, since this is a New Mexico fire department and that's a state symbol and the state colors.  The firefighter tools in the center of the logo are a consistent feature of fire department symbology, so they are important, too.  The fire in the center of the circle was hard to implement, so I settled for a plain red circle at the center.  The letters weren't directly digitized, I just found a similar font.  The shadowing on the letters is just too hard to implement, so I left it out.

I used the same heavy black cotton canvas as for the math art work.  I did try one new technique: floating stabilizer.  In this technique the stabilizer isn't hooped with the fabric, but just added underneath.  It allows more stabilizer to be used than will easily fit in the hoop.  I used a special embroidery tape from RNK Distributing to hold it in place.

Come back next week for more fun with a sewing machine!

Free Standing Christmas Ornament and Water Soluable Stabilizer

It's the season to work on fun Christmas themed projects!   This week, I decided to make a lovely Christmas ornament for my tree.

This item is free standing embroidery.  Regular embroidery is fancy stitching on fabric.  Free standing embroidery is fancy stitching without the fabric.  The designs have to be specially created to make this work.  I've done some of this before, with butterflies.  This design from Embroidery Library is called the carnival Christmas ornament.  It comes in a small enough size that it can be made with just a 100 mm square hoop.

While making the free standing embroidery, a stabilizer must be used to hold the stitches together during construction.  The idea is to make the stabilizer go away afterwards.  This is done with a water soluble stabilizer.  When you are done, you just was it away.  I've been using Sulky Ultra Solvy, a heavyweight plastic like material.  However, I've been having trouble with this material tearing when dense designs punch too many needle holes in it.  At the Houston International Quilt Festival, I picked up a new kind of water soluble stabilizer that I was hoping would work much better.

 This is Embellish Rise-Away Mesh, brought to you by the fine folks at RNK Distributing.

I tried using just a single layer of the mesh for the ornament.  It didn't work well.  The stabilizer distorts quite a bit when put under too much stress.

However, unlike the needle hole problem, this can be fixed by using two layers of the stabilizer.  I think a single layer would be fine for free standing lace, but the denser free standing embroidery does a lot better with two, and this design stitched out perfectly.

My machines are still busy, so come back next week for more fun with a sewing machine (or two)!

Husquarna Magestic Hoop

Size matters, even when it comes to embroidery hoops.  The biggest hoop out there is the Husquarna majestic hoop, which is currently only usable on the Viking Husquarna Epic sewing and embroidery machine.  I've got one of those, plus a need for size on one of my upcoming projects, so I decided to give the ginormous hoop a try.

The hoop comes with one test design for embroidery and another for quilting.  I decided to sew out the one for embroidery.

Here's the hoop itself, with some muslin.  There's a mount on both sides, under the fabric.  This hoop stitches out half the design, then you flip the hoop and it stitches out the other half.

Here's half the design.  Going to the other half, alignment is critical and some adjustments were necessary.  In fact, the amount of the adjustment required was large enough, it required rehooping to make it work.  That's a tough thing to get right, even with alignment stitches.

The final result isn't perfect, but it's off my only about a millimeter.  Most people will never notice.

There's no sense it letting this pretty embroidery go to waste.  It ends up like a lot of my experiments: as a throw pillow.  Just for scale, this is an 18"x18" pillow.

It's always fun trying out new toys and stretching my capabilities.

Come back next week for more fun with a sewing machine!

Thread Rack Covers

I like to keep my thread on a rack on the wall.  It's really nice to see all of it at once and be able to pick just the right color or colors.  I used to keep my regular sewing thread in a box.  When I put it on a rack, it was amazing how many duplicates I had and also how many missing colors.

There's issues with keeping thread on a rack.  Continuous exposure to sunlight doesn't do it any good.  Dust accumulation isn't great for it either.  I used to deal with the problem just by keeping my sewing room dark when I wasn't actively using it.  Now, I've decided to make covers for the thread racks to protect the thread.

I used a heavy weight cotton fabric to keep the covers fairly light proof.  Using a heavy weight fabric means that fairly dense and elaborate embroidery designs can be used.  These designs are fun, so why not make the covers decorative as well as useful?

I started with a rectangle of fabric.  It's 11" wider than the thread rack and 36" long.

The design I chose was a Mandarin Duck, one of the prettiest of the ornamental ducks.  You can find this design here.  I used the largest version of this design.

After the design is sewn, I made corners for the top of the cover.  The side is folded over to meet the top, then a 5.5" seam is sewn perpendicular to the edges.

After sewing the seam, the excess is trimmed.

No corners are sewn in the bottom of the cover, it just hangs loose.

The final step is to hem the entire outer edge of the cover.

I have lots of thread, so I need more than one rack.  I also made one to cover a double rack (two racks hung together).  As you can see, I stuck with the duck theme.

Come back next week for more Fun with a Sewing Machine.

Tree Skirt

Need a quick, last-minute addition to your Christmas decor?  This tree skirt could be just the thing.

It's made of plain polyester cotton fabric in festive red.  There's no pattern, just a circle on the outside and a circle on the inside.  I folded the fabric in quarters before cutting it.  The slit in the back makes it much easier to get around the base of the tree.

I dressed up the tree skirt with some quick stitching Christmas designs from Embroidery Library.

Some of the colors has to be modified to work on red, so the poinsettias are white instead of red.

 The outer edge is finished with a built-in decorative stitch in the shape of flowers.

Have a wonderful holiday and come back next week for more fun with a sewing machine.

Custom Dive Flag

I received a request from a friend to make a dive flag for the Wake Island Scuba Club.  This isn't something they could send out locally because Wake Island is a tiny sandbar in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and a long way from anywhere.  The idea was to use embroidery and/or applique to create the design.

Here is the original design.  The essential elements are apparently the red and white "divers down" flag, the outline of the island and the shark.  This design does have details that would be hard to capture with applique or embroidery, so some modification for the new medium is required.  There's also the question of exactly what items would be best executed with embroidery vs. applique.

I started with a JPG map of Wake Island.

I was able to bring this image into my Floriani Total Control embroidery design software as a background and then digitize the outline of the island.  (Actually, there are 3 islands here.)  I was able to do the same with the shark, picking out the eyes, mouth and gills as essential details to retain.

Here's the final design.  There's some big areas to be covered in both black and grey, so I decided to do these as applique and leave the shark details and lettering as embroidery.  The island and shark have to be worked as one piece, so the maximum size of the design is set by what will fit in my Bernina Jumbo Hoop.  The shark is superimposed on the island, so the island must be appliqued first, with the shark on top.  To maximize the size of the design, the lettering is done separately from the applique, after rehooping the fabric.

The first task was to create the flag itself.   The flag and all the applique are made from heavy weight flag nylon.  Some of this was obtained locally and some of it was sourced from Sailrite, an internet retailer of anything and everything related to both boats and fabric.  Sailrite also had the special flag tape and nice grommets for finishing the flag.

There's no standard dimension for dive flags.  After some research, I found that common aspect ratios for flags include 3:2 and 5:3.   I chose to use 5:3 although on further consideration 3:2 might have been better.  With the size of the applique design set by the jumbo hoop, I elected for a 30"x18" finished size for the flag.

I used paper to create patterns for the flag.  I wanted the white stripe to be nice and visible, so it's 6" wide.  The cutting mat marked in 1" squares sure made the job of creating the pattern a lot easier.

Here's the finished flag.  The seams for the white stripe are all flat-felled seams and the three edges are hemmed.  The left edge is bound with flag tape and set with brass washer grommets.  This finish isn't strictly necessary since this is going to be a wall decoration rather than flown as a flag, but it's a good finishing touch.

With the flag complete, it's time to move on to the ornamentation.

The applique design is printed at 100% scale and then cut out.  The paper pieces are applied to the black nylon with temporary fabric adhesive.  Then the pieces are cut from the fabric.

The machine is busy appliqueing the outline of the island.  It's a very complex shape, much more suited to machine applique than hand guided applique.  Once the island is down, the shark is appliqued on top, and then the eyes, mouth and gills of the shark are embroidered.

I used just a simple tear away stabilizer for this project.  The fabric is dimensionally stable, so a sticky stabilizer is not required.  There needs to be no stabilizer remaining on the back of the flag, so the simple design a tear-away met that requirement nicely.  The top and bottom lettering was done with two different hoopings of the fabric.

This project has already been sent off to Wake Island.  My projects are certainly getting world wide exposure!

Come back next Saturday for an all new project that's also related to water.

Embroidered Napkins

Some friends of mine are holding a baptism for their infant daughter and throwing a party afterwards.  This is a major event and they were wanting to have party favors that their friends could take home to remember the event.  They settled on embroidered napkins for the party favors.

The first consideration was how many napkins and what size and type.  Based on the guest list for the party, they estimated that 40 napkins would be about right.  They wanted very traditional linen napkins, however these proved to be unobtainable for any reasonable price.  In the end, my fabric stash yielded up enough linen to make 8 napkins for special guests, such as the priest and Godparents, and we settled on polyester/cotton napkins already made for everyone else.  Those napkins came in packages of 1 dozen, so I made 36 cotton napkins.

Next was the discussions about what sort of design to use.  The sheer number of napkins involved meant that a relativelty quick stitching design with few color changes would be highly desirable.  A large, dense design doesn't work well on napkins anyway.

A long search turned up this lovely vintage wreath of daisies.  As an added bonus, the daisy is the girl's birth month flower.  To personalize the design, her initials were added to the center of the wreath.  Using the Floriani Total Control embroidery design software allowed me to add the initials and then change the order of the sewing so that the pink initials are sewn right after the pink flowers, rather than after the whole wreath is finished, avoiding one color change.

 The resulting design fits nicely on the folded napkin.  Because the design is sewn to a napkin, there's a desire to have no stabilizer left on the back side.   A tear away would be a mess, with all the small areas in the flower pedals, so a water soluble stabilizer is needed.  The design has to be so close to the edge that the napkin itself isn't firmly help by the hoop.  Instead, the stabilizer is firmly held by the hoop and the napkin is firmly pinned to the stabilizer.  It's necessary to pin the two outside the area of the design.

After a serious workout of my embroidery machine, then washing the napkins to remove the remaining stabilizer, then ironing the napkins, here's the whole set, gathered all together.  The linen napkins are the stack on the right.

Epilogue: The party was a marvelous success and the guests departed with their souvenir napkins.

Come back next week for another embroidery project from the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

Latch Hook Rug Pillow

We all have those projects lurking in the sewing room that never seem to actually get finished.   One of mine was a latch hook rug.  The latch hook part has been done for nearly a year, but I've never done anything more with it.  There's a few things you can do with the rugs, like making them into wall hangings or decorative throw pillows.  I chose the pillow route.

The first thing is to select a suitable backing material.  A heavy fabric works best and I chose a black duck canvas.  It works well with the black in the rug.

The backing material needs to be machine stitched to the rug all the way around, which means either a zipper or overlapping panels needs to be used.  I cut pieces of the canvas so that they would overlap by about 6" and have a 1" seam allowance for the rug to canvas seam.  The overlapping edges of the panels need to be finished first.  Then, the whole back of the pillow is basted together.  Here's the pillow back laid over the rug.

It's necessary to trip excess canvas from the rug.  Leave about 1" of canvas all around.

The rug and back can be sewn together with a wide stitch.  I used a three step zig-zag.  The wide stitch helps catch more threads in the mostly open rug canvas.  Be careful to sew very close to the yarns without catching them in the seam.

The finished pillow is 14 x 20, definitely not a size where you can get a pre-made pillow form.  I made a pillow in the right size with polyester-cotton broadcloth left over from a different project and poly fiber fill.  

To finish the project, just insert the stuffed pillow into the rug cover.  Whew!  That's one more project out of my sewing room and out doing something useful.