This week’s Creative Space (s) October 1, 2009

This week’s creative spaces are all about getting ready for the Christmas market frenzy. Well, we’re hoping it’ll be a frenzy. A polite frenxy in which everyone pays for their goods and no one gets ripped to pieces or trampled. Obviously.

First up, since it’s Thursday The Bothered Owl High Command were making stuff at Oscar’s this morning. We’re trying hard to kick start some kind of crafting group on a Thursday morning. So far, it’s just the two of us (we can make it if we try. HAH!) But we live in hope.

So our first creative space is from Oscar’s. Alex designed these cute felt cubes a few months ago. We’ve both been working away at them, appliqueing the shapes onto them and now Alex is slowly but surely stitching the pieces together to make these gorgeous brightly coloured blocks. She’s working on a design for a flower rattle as well.

Shape block and obligatory cup of tea

Alex busy stitching away

Our crafty assistant, getting creative with the steps.

Our second creative space is the bench in my back garden, covered in lovely warm snuggly squishy blankets. I’ve done half a dozen of them so far.

Like a big squishy handmade sofa

How to make your own binding September 23, 2009

Okay, tutorial number two: making blanket binding. Again, it’s easier to do than to write about, so please bear with me as I am really new at this whole teaching of technical skills thing.

Pick and Mix

The first step is to choose your fabric. You want something that will make a coherent whole with your blanket or quilt’s colours and patterns. Contrast is good, clash is bad.

I’ve chosen to use some of the IKEA fabrics that Alex and I picked up on our trek last week.

Candy stripes and hippos

Because they’re all from the same kid’s range (by Eva Lundgreen, apparently), the colours blend well together and they’re just so… cheery.

Decide on a width and a length of strip. I like mine wide but I tend to vary the length a little. Sometimes I will cut a strip that will be the length of one whole side of the blanket, sometimes I do lots of shorter strips to get a really stripy effect. It’s up to your taste, you might like your binding all in one colour and very thin. That’s the beauty of making your own!

However you choose to do your strips, you will need to make a template. I just used the first strip that I cut out and then laid it on the fabric and cut round it. You’ll soon have a nice little stack of strips ready to sew. Like so:

A pile of strips

Next step is to iron everything in sight. You really should press the strips before you sew them, it’ll flatten out any creases and give you a chance to check everything is straight and smooth.

Joining

Once you have your stack-o-strips ready to go, you need to join them together into one long strip.

Place two strips right sides together, facing inwards. You can pin them if you want to, I generally don’t just because the strips aren’t that huge and I’m using a non-slippery fabric. If you’re working with something that tends to slide, use pins. It’ll save you many tears.

Backstitching the strips together.

The sprawling backside of backstitch.

The smooth neat side of the backstitch seam

Backstitch was the first stitch I ever learned how to do. My mum taught me when I was 6 or 7. You can kind of get an idea of how the needle should go through the fabric from the pictures.

Keep joining the strips together until you have a lovely long chain like this:

A nice chain of strips, all ready to be ironed

Preparing the strips for binding

The next step is to get out your trusty iron and irioning board. Trust me on this, the ironing is key for good binding.

First you need to press all the little seams you’ve just made. You can press them open:

Pressing the seam open

or press them flat and to one side:

Pressing seams flat and to the side

It doesn’t really matter for this project which method you choose. But if you press them to the side, make sure that you press them all to the same side. E.g all to the right or all to the left. Be consistent, it looks tidier that way.

Turn, turn, turn

Now you’re ready to turn the edges under, ready to sew the binding to the blanket. Again, you want to use your iron for this, it holds the folded under bits in place like magic. You want to fold at least 2.5 cms of fabric in, so that you get a nice margin at each edge. When you stitch the binding in place on the blanket/quilt/whatever, you will be sewing these folds in place, effectively hemming the binding.   Finally, fold the whole thing in half, length ways and iron a nice crease down the middle. And you’re ready to fit your binding to your blanket/quilt.

See, nice smooth edges.

Turning the Corner

You’ve made your binding, now you just need to fit it to your blanket.  I’ll show you how I did mine.

First lay out and pin your blanket. You want to make sure that sucker is not going to move while you’re fiddling with it because the last thing you want is for this to happen:

Look at those wrinkles. Sigh. Mother pucker.

This was my first attempt at making a blankie for a very long time and I forgot the cardinal rule of pin, pin and pin some more.

Once you’ve got your main fabric pieces laid out and pinned as you want them, you need to sandwich the raw edges of the blanket between the layers of your binding. Like this:

Mmmm fabric sandwich.

The crease that you ironed down the centre of your binding strip should sit along the raw edge of your blanket, dividing your binding strip precisely in half, half to the front of the blanket, half to the back.

Next you’re going to turn and mitre the corners. This is so much easier than it sounds, but I only just figured out how to do it the other night. It makes a really nice sharp looking corner.

Make a right angle fold in the fabricThen pinch and fold the other side

Smooth it down and you've made a mitred corner.Nice, crisp corner, pinned and ready for stitching.

Work your way around three sides of your blanket. The fourth side is where you will join together the two ends of your binding strip to finish off the final corner. Make sure each end overlaps the edge of the blanket by a good few centimetres. You want to leave enough room to be able to put in your mitre, even after you’ve joined the ends together.

Pin the ends, right sides together, then back stitch just as you did when you first started making your binding strips. Fold the edges back under, then mitre the corner as shown in the pictures above. Pin in place.

Pinned and ready to be sewn up

Tah dah! Now all you have to do is choose what kind of thread and stitch you want to do and you’re ready to finish your blanket.

And when it is all sewn up it should look like this:

All done

Graft September 22, 2009

Not the kind where you put together the toe of a sock either. Although I wish I was doing some of that right now. Never thought I’d find myself longing for a bout of Kitchener’s Stitch but I am going a little fabric blind at the moment.

No, the graft is the hard kind. Two nights in a row I’ve spent measuring, chopping, pinning and then sewing binding strips. I’ve just ironed it and done the seam allowances – REALLY IMPORTANT, more on that in a sec – and I have enough sewn and prepared for four blankets. I’ve got two more waiting to be stitched and ironed and then I think I will sew those six together. Just to make a change from measuring and chopping strips because it’s starting to make me a leeetle crazy.

The seam allowances: really, really important when you are making your own stuff, be it a bag or a beautiful new skirt. Especially if you are making your own patterns.

I made myself this beautiful beautiful skirt a few months ago. Brown corduroy that I got for a quid at the fabric shop. Lined and with a contrast hem and waist band in this fabulous orange and brown vintage floral (sounds heinous, actually utterly lovely). I made the pattern myself, based on one of my very favourite (shop bought) skirts. Very easy to do, if your skirt is a simple A-line without any pleats or darts. You simply trace around it and follow the lines.

Except what you have to remember is that what you’ve traced is the size of the skirt once it has been sewn togther. IE sans seam allowances. Which means, if you don’t then remember to add the seam allowances, you’ve effectively just reduced the size of your wonderful skirt by a fair margin. You’ve already shaved off up to 3/4 of an inch on each side (the missing seam allowances) and then when you sew it together, you’ll be shaving off another 3/4 of an inch on each side for the new seams.

And if you, like me, are a curvy 31 year old mother of two, well, let’s just say the resulting fit is snug. No, no there will be no pictures. I have worn the skirt but due to the squeeze factor, not often.

All of which is to say remember your seam allowances and making blankets is hard work.

I haven’t forgotten that I promised a tutorial on the blanket bindings and mitered corners. I’ve taken loads of pics but haven’t had time to construct the words as yet. They’re marinating in my head but I’ve been a little busy with other things. Like what feels like several miles worth of fabric, for example. It will be up soon, I promise.

Human versus Machine September 19, 2009

I have a tshirt somewhere with a giant robot on it, crushing the life from some cowering peoples. It reads “You are no match for me, puny humans.”  I think I would like to dispute that, after spending three or four hours this morning sewing, unpicking, re-sewing, unpicking… etc whilst trying to bind one of our new baby blankets.

Okay, I know my sewing machine isn’t exactly a robot, and most of the problems I had stem from user error and the fact that I’m trying to operate the machine while running a fever and fighting off the interfering hands of Esme, who thinks my sewing machine is The Most Amazingly Exciting Thing EVAR.  But still, I reckon I could probabaly have handsewn the blanket in at least the same amount of time, if not slightly less.

I start off in a straight line, then get halfway along a seam and find that although the fabric’s been pinned within an inch of its life, somehow it’s gone wonky or slipped or the machine’s unthreaded itself. I broke three needles this morning. THREE. I think I’ve broken maybe one handsewing needle in the whole time I’ve been sewing.

It’s incredibly frustrating. I love my sewing machine. I do. It makes making my own clothes a breeze. I can whip up a new skirt in a little under an hour and a half, a little more if I draft a new pattern by hand. (And can I just say, if you have any interest in learning how to do that, you need to buy Sew What Skirts. It’s utterly fabulous, the most useful instructional book I’ve ever bought. Apart from some of my stitch-tionaries.)

But for this kind of sewing, where the seam is decorative as well as functional, I like to be able to feel what I’m doing. The machine saves me time. No question that it is faster to sew a quilt or a bib or whatever with the machine doing all the work. That’s not the point.

Using the machine stresses me out. I fret about the seams being straight, about the stitches locking in place, about not catching both sides of the binding. Most irritating of all, I have to fend off Esme who likes to scale the heights of the dining table and yank on the bobbin of thread on the top of the machine. She’s been responsible for making needles explode before now. I have to be constantly on guard, against the onslaught of tiny hands  and also tiny backsides. Both of the girls have been known to park their rumps on the foot pedal while I’ve been paused removing a pin. Not a pretty sight.

Hand sewing takes longer, you work stitch by stitch, carefully and slowly. When quilting something like a blanket or a piece of patchwork I often have to stop to check the placement of the thread, making sure it’s even and straight. But I can do it in my lap in the lounge while the girls are playing. It’s quiet, it’s calming and I can feel what I’m doing. It’s relaxing.

So, I’m off to go huddle on the sofa with my needle and thread. Metaphorically obviously. Because actually huddling with my needle and thread would be pointy and painful. I may be feverish, but I’m not stupid. Well, not that stupid.