School Club Banner

The School Club Roundup, an amateur radio event where schools and other amateurs all over North America attempt to contact each other by radio, is coming up next week.  One of the participating clubs will be the amateur radio club at Monrovia Middle School in Monrovia, AL.  I made a banner for the table where we'll have all the radios to help the students at the school know what we are up to.

The first task was to decide what to put on the banner.  Obviously, the club's call sign, KD4MMS, needed to be prominent.  Then, a bit of explanation.  The school mascot is the hawks, so Hawks Amateur Radio fit in the space and explained at least a little bit.  The school colors are yellow and black, which made choosing colors for the banner easy.  I used nylon canvas, a fairly heavy material typically used for flags.

The first task was to cut out all the letters.  There's a lot of ways to do this, but I chose to use my Cricut maker and a standard font for all the cutting.  The letters sure look a lot better than if I'd tried to design or cut them.

The letters in the call sign had to be in the design individually because they are nearly at the limits of the 12"x12" cutting sheet.  The smaller letters could be done several at a time. 

I laid out all the letters and tacked them down with a spray adhesive.  They wasn't quite good enough to keep them all attached during the sewing phase, but it was a good start.

Each of the letters was individually sewn to the banner.  I used a 4mm zigzag stitch with a 2 mm stitch length.  All of the sewing was hand guided.

The finished applique of the letters looks good.

Next, I applied a back sashing to finish the banner and deal with all the raw edges. 

The last step was to put grommets in each of the corners.

Let's hope the kids get good atmospheric conditions for next week and that a bunch of them see the banner and decide to come see and hear for themselves what's going on!

Come back next week for another adventure in sewing!

Quick Embroidery Project

Ham radio operators often wear clothing or tags with their call signs.  This helps them recognize other people that they've talked to on the radio, but might never have seen in person.  A friend recently got her first ham radio license and I thought I would surprise her with a gift of a shirt with her own call sign on it.

I bought a simple solid color T-shirt.  I was careful to choose one that wasn't quite as thin as some of the ones being sold -- the embroidery needs some kind of decent substrate and I'm sure the recipient would like to wear the shirt more than once or twice.

Step 1 is to design the embroidery.  Since only simple letters are required, it would have been possible to just use my embroidery machine to do the design.  However, I decided to use my Floriani Total Control software instead.  using the software gives me a much larger choice of fonts.  I chose simple block letters for the call sign, since that's the usual and customary choice.  I opted for a more script look for her name.

Step 2 is to do the embroidery.  I attended the International Quilt Show in Houston last month.  There were thousands of vendors and some of them had products related to embroidery.

This tape claims to be just the thing when you are trying to keep parts of a garment away from the hoop and the needle, which can be a real challenge when dealing with T-shirts.

The tape proved to be noticeably stickier than painter's tape and to be capable of holding the shirt very well.  It left no residue on the fabric.  Overall, this new to me product met my expectations.

There you have it: a simple project, a review of a new product, and a happy ending.

Come back next week for a new fun project that involves a sewing machine!

New Purse and the Jumbo Hoop

While at the Huntsville Hamfest, one of my fellow amateur radio operators, saw my purse, the one I specifically designed for this hobby.  I wrote about it here, theree weeks ago.  She wanted one for herself and I agreed to make one.  Here's a picture of the final result, with part of her call sign covered to protect her privacy.  She specifically requested the red and white color scheme and the materials are microsuede, as before.

When I made the original purse the radio applique was done with hand guided techniques.  That worked, but it's not the only way to achieve the desired result.

I've had this Bernina Jumbo Hoop lurking in the sewing room.  Just learning to use the machine has been intimidating, so I'd never gotten the hoop out of the box.  However, it's just the thing for this project since it let me do all of the embroidery and applique without removing the fabric from the hoop.

The flowers and lightening bolts are commercially available embroidery patterns available from Embroidery Library.  The radio applique was original work. I decided to keep the radio as applique.  Part of the reason is the need for a mesh panel, so that the radio can be heard, even when in the purse.  I fired up my Floriani embroidery design software and used simple shapes to construct the radio as an applique.  Then I just added the lightening bolts, flowers, and the call sign as text.

I printed the embroidery pattern and laid it over the purse front as a test fit.  Work on in the design software to get all the elements of the design in the right place worked well, with a couple of iterations.

The next challenge was to figure out how to hoop the project.  I like cut away stabilizer for this project, since it can be left whole as interfacing for the purse.  However, the cut away stabilizer isn't wide enough to work in this hoop!  Instead, I cut the cut away stabilizer as interfacing, just the same size as the purse front.  Then I got a roll of 20" wide tear away stabilizer and created a piece big enough for the jumbo hoop.  Finally, I sewed all three layers together and then hooped it.

The first part of the embroidery was create the radio.  I started with a sew out of the outline of the radio and mesh window.

Next, I attached the black applique fabric to the front of the purse using a spray-on fabric glue.  Then I attached the mesh to the back of the project with masking tape (available in the paint section of your local hardware store). 

I finished the applique and then the rest of the embroidery, resulting in a very nice purse front.

The red and black fabric, along with the stabilizers, was cut away from in front of the mesh window.

The lining of the purse requires a matching mesh window to line up with the one on the front of the purse.  This can be made somewhat larger than the circle in the front. In this view, the lining is on top of the purse front and the table can be seen through 2 layers of mesh.

 A pocket is sewn on top of the lining mesh window to hold the radio.  Elastic in the top of the pocket holds the radio in place.

After the lining and the outside of the purse are complete, the two are sewn together at the top, resulting in a nice finished project.

This was an interesting project because it involved learning new things with the embroidery software, which I am still struggling to master and using new hardware, the jumbo hoop.  Working with the hoop went a lot more smoothly than I'd ever hoped for.  

Check back next week for an all new project with the jumbo hoop!

Amateur Radio Operator's Purse

It's Hamfest Weekend here in Huntsville, Alabama, when amateur radio operator operators gather from far and near.  There aren't many Young Ladies (a term encompassing all females with radio licenses) in the hobby, but there are a few of us.  We all need some place to stash a handheld radio.  It's also customary for radio operators at an event like this to wear something, like a hat, shirt or name tag with our call sign that identifies us to others we might have talked to on the radio, but never met.  I decided to create a purse that would fulfill both needs.

 This handy purse displays my call sign and has a specially designed pocket for my radio.  The lightening bolts and daylilies are just on there for ornamentation.  It's made of micro suede, which is easy to work with, durable, and even washable.  I'd live to give a pattern number for this purse, but there isn't one.  It's an original design that I've evolved after making a few purses.  The purse is deliberately small, so it doesn't tend to collect junk.

I used a variety of techniques in embellishing the purse.  The radio is applique.  Needless to say, there's not a applique pattern commercially available, so I designed my own and hand guided my machine to stitch it down.   The buttons on the radio were also hand guided machine embroidery, with a wide zig-zag stitch.  The lettering is from built in stitches in my sewing machine.  The "speaker" in the middle of the radio is actually reverse applique.  The mesh is attached to the back of the micro suede fabric and once the circle was sewn, the micro suede was cut away to reveal the mesh.  There's a matching mesh window in the purse lining, enabling the radio to be monitored while it's in the purse.  My call sign and other embellishments were done with conventional machine embroidery.

The top of the radio pocket has elastic, which keeps the radio from falling out.  The purse is closed with a zipper.  The open end of the zipper is on the same end as the radio pocket, so the antenna can stick out of the purse while it is closed.

Come back next week when I explore using a new to me kind of fabric.