Looks Like a Leather Jacket

It looks like a leather jacket, but it isn't!  It's made from a scuba knit that I bought at Walmart.  This relatively new fabric is a heavy knit, something like a lightweight neoprene in weight and drape, hence the name scuba knit.  Compared to leather, this fabric is quite a bit cheaper and has a nice stretch to it.  It's likely not as durable as leather and I certainly wouldn't choose to wear it as personal protection on a motorcycle!

I started with Kwik Sew 3764.  There's two versions of this jacket, one with all the fancy zippers and features and a more stripped down version.  I made the fancier one.

In addition to the the asymmetric zippered front, the jacket features zippered pockets.  The zippers are exposed and part of the look, so I used shiny brass zippers to extenuate them.  Lining up a bunch of black fabric was a bit of a challenge.  I found that adding extra light at the ironing board was very helpful.

 The sleeves also have zippered gaskets at the bottom.This is the first time I've tried this technique.  It's easier than it looks.  The fabric on the inside is a separate piece.

The jacket also has epaulets.  These are not sewn into the neck seam, but are sewn on separately afterwards.  With many layers of heavy fabric, even my sewing machine was finding it tough going.  I ended up sewing them on by hand.  I needed to get out the really big needles, the ones for sewing sails.

Here's the finished project.  It's a nice addition to my look.

Come back next week for a new project!

In The Hoop Christmas Ornaments

Christmas is a great time for fun little craft projects.  You can make things that are pretty, but don't need to stand up to the rigors of daily, year-round use.  It's also a great time to experiment with new techniques.

Embroidery Library has quite a collection of in the hoop Christmas ornaments and they add more every year. These little gems are all made with the embroidery unit.  There's no regular sewing involved at all.  I will buy some each year and try them, like the free standing ornament from last week.  My tree is now mostly covered in hand made items.

Unlike the free standing ornament, these are made with felt.  A tear-away stabilizer is used.  (A water soluble one is a bad idea in this case, because you don't want to get the finished item wet.)   All the fancy stuff is sewn on the front, then another piece of felt is added to the back. 

You can even note on the back which year you made it.  Finally, the item is lightly stuffed with a tiny bit of polyester fleece.

Some designs work best with white felt, others do better with colors.

There are even designs that are not stuffed at all, where ordinary fabric can be used.

Best of all, most of these fit nicely in the 4" square hoop, so they can be made with just about any embroidery machine.

Merry Christmas to all.  Come back next week for more fun with a sewing machine as we explore a completely different project.

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!

Christmas Stocking for a Mermaid

It's that time of year when crafters of all types contemplate holiday themed projects.  I got a request for a really cool Christmas stocking, which some kind of ocean or water theme.  A fairly conventional approach might be a stocking embroidered with any of the Santa enjoying the ocean or tropics designs.  I decided to be a but more creative and ask
"What sort of a stocking might a mermaid have?"  Surely not the usual sock, since she has fins, not feet.  Also, not something fuzzy, since few creatures of the sea have fur.   With a little help from my embroidery design software, Floriani Total Control, I came up with this idea.

The embroidery design was fairly simple to put together.  There's an outline, some scales, all similar arcs, some lines for the tail and an initial.  It was designed to be the maximum possible size for my 260x360 mm hoop.

I wanted a fabric that was shiny of glittery for this project.  I also needed something opaque and strong.  I decided not to meet all the requirements with a single fabric and opted for a shiny translucent organza over an ordinary polyester-cotton broadcloth.  The broadcloth is a staple of my stash, so I had it in variety of colors.  Since this stocking is for a little girl just celebrating her second Christmas, I chose pink.  Here's the fabrics hooped together before sewing.

When all the embroidery is done, I have a fishtail with a seam line.

Since this is a three dimensional fabric, I need a second piece for a back.  I can't make a mirror reverse, like for the fleece fish.  The initial E would be backwards.  Instead, the outline is symmetrical, so I can sew two identical sides and sew them together.

 With the front and back of the stocking sewn together, all I needed to do was hem it at the top.  I added a shiny ribbon trim at the top, complete with a loop so it could be hung by the chimney with care.

I actually made a set of these for the whole family.  Mom and Dad's stockings are Christmas red and green.   I used the same organza for all, but different shades of broadcloth.

Come back week for more fun with a sewing machine!

Long Sleeve Knit Shirt

I've been looking at shirts that work with mid-rise pants, the kind that seem so popular in stores.  As everyone else has already figured out, they don't work well with shirts that are supposed to be tucked in.  So, much of my winter wardrobe is in need of changes.  T For fabric, I choose a cotton-polyester interlock.  This fabric is easy to work with, durable, and warm for winter wear.

 The usual sort of very loose tops don't appeal to me much.  I can see why y'all wear them, but it's not my style and it doesn't look good on me either.   I went looking for some other sort of solution and found Kwik-Sew 4216.  This looked like an interesting compromise between a fairly fitted top and one that would work with the despised mid-rise pants.  It has a fairly fitted top, a waist seam at the true waist and a peplum.

The pattern envelope show tops in interesting prints, but I chose a plain solid fabric, perfect for embellishment.  A shirt neckline is a perfect place to add embellishment, in this case machine embroidery with a pattern from Embroidery Library called Celtic Diamonds neckline. I used the V- neck version.

It's important to get the embroidery lined up just right.  Using a template, a 100% scale version of the design on paper helps a lot.  As you can see, I did the embroidery before sewing the shirt together.

The peplum offered some other options for embellishment.  The asymmetric hemline is one of the attractions of the shirt, so why not emphasize it?  This simple built in decorative stitch did the trick.

How did the shirt turn out?  It does work quite well with the mid-rise pants and gives me some wardrobe options.  I wish I'd cut it to a smaller size, however.  It worked well enough I might give this pattern another spin later.  It has a short sleeve version, which could work well for a summer shirt.

Come back next week and see what sewing happened at my house over the holiday weekend!

Highlights from the Houston Quilt Show

Last weekend, I had the privilege of attending the Houston International Quilt show. These are not your ordinary quilts.  They are all original designs, executed by some of the best quilters in the business.

This quilt by Setsuko Matsushima of Japan won the Founder's Award.  I'm not generally a fan of mostly grey quilts, but this one caught my eye.  I really like how it's a fascinating mixture of both American art, in the traditional quilt blocks, and Japanese art in the depiction of the waves.  This quilt honors and offers a ray of hope to those who suffered due to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Here's  Kimberly Lacey of Colorado standing by her First Place winning quilt.  The design of this quilt was inspired by ammonites, a very extinct sea shell found as fossils.  (Who says there's no science in the fabric arts?)  The pattern was created with shimmering fabric paints on silk, rather than the more traditional pieced or appliqued fabrics.  She's just getting started at as a professional quilter, so if you like her work, check out her website here.

What to do when you know what fabric design you want, but it doesn't exist?  Why, you create it in the computer and then have it printed!  That's exactly what happened with this striking quilt by Karlee Porter of Utah.  If you like the design, she's got it for sale.

If you like more traditional piecing and applique, check out this quilt by Beth Nufer of Oregon. It was made from fabric that shades from white to grey and then solid brightly colored fabric.  The idea is to give the quilt a 3D effect.

For the mathematically inclined, there's this quilt by Claudia Pfeil of Germany.  The black shapes are inspired by the Mandelbrot set, one of the very first fractals that was discovered.  Fractals have infinitely detailed shapes, so working with them in quilting is quite a challenge.

There's some totally fun things at the show too, like this scene of Flamingos all dressed for a party by Beth Miller of Australia.

Or this fishy quilt by Tomiko Onishi of Japan.  Look carefully -- all those fish are actually vegetables!

My cousin Suzy Webster had two quilts in the show this year.  The top one, Dotville, was inspired by a class she took at last year's show.  The bottom one, Order to Chaos, is based on a design created by her father, John Shier.  His artistic explorations have resulted in a completely new way to generate fractal geometries.  You can check out Suzy's blog about quilting here and John's webpage here.

Come back next week and see how I am dealing with the challenges posed by mid-rise pants.

Jacket with White Satin Trim Part 2

Last week, I talked about the decorative trim for a jacket that I am making.  This week, we see how the jacket went together.

I started with Vogue 1493.

The home made bias tape isn't just used for trim.  The seams are bound with the bias tape, rather than finishing them with an overcast stitch.

The sleeves have an usual shape, with the large and ornamented lower sleeves.  The seam comes to a sharp point.

This seam is made possible by clipping the upper sleeve almost to the seam line.

Here's the completed sleeve.

The upper part of the sleeve is a fairly standard shape, so it sews easily to the jacket.

The front band also proved to be fairly easy to attach.

The final step is to make 1" bias tape and attach it at the front band/front seam.  It turns out that 1" bias tape is more difficult to deal with than the 1/2" variety.  Also, if you try to feed a strip that's too wide into the bias tape maker, the fabric can end up melted (it is polyester) and ruined.  The stuff is squirrelly when you try to attach it also, note all of the pins.

The jacket did get finished.  Now I have something to wear to the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra concert!

Come back next week for a report from the Houston International Quilt Expo.