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Craft Countdown #9 was robot iron-ons. It was getting close to 11:30 and I was worried about running out of ideas, so I started rooting through my fabric drawers. The top one holds flannel-ish material and denim, and I pulled out a small remnant of robot fabric. I loved this fabric, but there is so little of it, the options for using it are limited. I had thought about making iron-on patches out of it, but hadn’t gotten around to it.

What I had on hand for fusible web in sheet form was Wonder Under, so that is what I used.

I cut pieces, lined them up with the pictures, and ironed them down. Of course, it being 11:30, I did two dumb things: I started ironing one on upside-down, necessitating a later cleaning of the iron, and I peeled the paper off before cutting them instead of leaving it as a protective backing. They’re still cute.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with them. I have made these before, out of other fabrics that had nice little pictures, but they languish in a drawer for the most part.

Of course, making the business card case and the memo pad holder gave me a use for some of my commercial iron-ons, so maybe these will see use in such projects as well.

Are you looking to give something sweet and personal and handmade to your sweetie, but lack hours to spend on it? A little fabric heart charm tucks into any card and is quick to make.

You need fabric and felt in coordinating colors, fusible web such as Stitch Witchery, coordinating thread for your sewing machine, and, if desired, embroidery floss or other added decorations. You’ll be making two fusible-web-backed hearts of fabric and sandwiching some felt between them.

If you want to embellish the individual sides with embroidery, do that first. You could do hearts, of course, or flowers, a smiley face, initials, a pet name, words like “love” or “be mine”, silhouettes, or even an arrow going through the heart (which might take some planning to line up right).

Second, draw or trace two matching hearts on the paper of the fusible web (I have a pdf of sample heart shapes for you). Make sure they are mirror images to each other! Cut them out and steam iron to the wrong side of your fabric, centering your embroidery underneath, if any.

Cut out the fabric and peel off the paper. Iron one heart onto coordinating felt, cut out the felt, and then iron the other fabric heart onto the back. You may cut the felt flush with the fabric edge, or leave a little margin. I did one of mine on two colors of felt, the line between the colors joining the center top and bottom point of the heart. That would perhaps have been more effective had I left a margin of felt around the fabric; it is a very subtle effect. The other heart I cut out with pinking shears, which did not do so well on the felt but did well enough.

Finally, machine stitch around near the edge, or whip stitch by hand. This is an optional step, since the fusible web should keep everything together, but makes for a sturdier finished product. It also frames any embellishment you added and provides more visual interest if you did not add any embellishment. If your embellishment goes clear to the edge of the heart (for example you lined up an arrow so it would go right to the edges) you could skip this or make two partial lines of stitching, stopping short of your embellishment on either side.

On the violets heart, I couldn’t decide which of my two coordinating green threads I liked better, so I put one in the bobbin and one on top. I stitched around twice with my presser foot lined up with the edge of the felt, and then flipped the heart over and stitched around twice again with the presser foot lined up with the first line of stitching. On the red heart I used one of my special zigzag stitches to try to echo the design of the fabric. I also have a special zigzag that looks rather like an EKG and would be a great choice for this project. On both hearts I steam ironed once more after stitching, in an effort to have the fusible web also fuse to the thread and hold it in place.

Inspired by Craft Countdown #3, the business card case, I made a memo pad case for #8. I was also inspired by the fact that I had a big gecko iron-on that didn’t fit on the business card case.

I had bought some memo pads before the holidays, in case any small children needed entertaining with coloring and stickers, so I made the case to fit them: about a half inch wider, and probably somewhat more than a half inch taller, times two.

The pocket is a piece of stiff white fabric with each edge folded in a half inch, and the open edge tucked under again (so it is folded down by 1/4″ twice). I stitched very close to the raw edges on the sides and bottom to keep the seam allowance fabric from scrunching when the memo pad was inserted.

The cover was a little flimsy, since it was just thin felt, so later on I decided to add a small pocket to it mostly to stiffen it up. I then had a bunch of uneven stitch lines, so I thought I needed either more stitching, or less. Since less would have been difficult, I went around with a zigzag. I like the result.

This is #3 from the Craft Countdown.

Sometime early in 2010, after calendars went on deep sale, I bought the 2010 Sewing Calendar from Accord Publishing. It was an odd beast; it looks like it should be a page-a-day, but each page has three to four days on it (weekends share a third of a page). Still, that makes 104 sewing projects, of which I had yet to make any before New Year’s Eve.

As I flipped through, the felt business card case caught my eye. I have been unable to find it online – the website of the person it’s attributed to, Lauren Brandy, is now all about painting – but there are a great many tutorials available, several of which are similar.

I thought about embellishing mine with buttons, but was dissatisfied with my selection. However, I had a number of iron-on appliques bought before I realized I just don’t make things that appliques go on, and they came out to play. A button did as well; I changed the closure from velcro to a button and elastic loop.

Originally I planned to have a shot of the open, empty case, saying I just needed business cards to go in it, but between then and now my lovely sister made me some!

I have for you another installment of material related to the Sewing Tidbits page. Mostly a few pictures.

I love box pleats. And inverted pleats, which are box pleats on the back. I think it is because I like symmetry. Below we also have a picture of a standard, or knife, pleat, for comparison.

Box pleats appear in the center back of dress shirts and where the lining of a coat meets the coat in the top center back. I use inverted pleats in many places where I need to take width out, because I think the way the fabric spreads is pretty. For example, if I were making a bag that was to be fuller on the inside than at the top opening, I would probably use a box pleat on the side to bring it down to the top dimension.

The following is my attempt to show the results of different approaches to meeting a new seam and an old one, for example when you take in pants at the waist. You can see that a very obtuse corner is not much different from an actual curve, because the fabric is inclined against having sharp folds, but a sharper angle (though still obtuse!) gives a decided corner to the fabric. The pictures below also illustrate clipping curves in seams. [I would also trim the allowance in real life so it was all in the 5/8" range.] If the seam line is closest to the raw edge at the middle of the curve, clip a notch out; if the ends of the curve are toward the raw edge you can notch or just snip. In the former case when you turn the piece right-side-out the seam allowance has less room and in the latter case it has more room.

Finally, I have action shots of the pants cuff manipulative from class.

Just a few things of use…

Last Tuesday afternoon I had a haircut. As often happens, I completely forgot that it was the holiday season and I would like to give my stylist a gift until a couple of hours before. Or, really, about an hour and fifteen minutes before. I thought I would cut a piece of nice fabric, get cookies, and wrap them in the fabric.

In about twenty minutes I made a reversible drawstring gift bag, and then I stopped by the nice grocery store en route for some gluten free cookies. That is why these pictures are all in my car.

It wasn’t until I was writing this post that it occurred to me the other fabric is also cranes.

Later I made some more bags of the same sort, so I could share the method with you.

You’ll cut two identical pieces of fabric. Make them twice as wide as you want the finished bag, plus an inch, and the height from bottom to drawstring plus a generous two inches. The pieces below are 20″ wide and 12″ tall, and the bag they made ended up 9.5″ wide and not quite 11″ tall, not quite 10″ to the bottom line of stitching for the drawstring casing.

The pins in the second picture indicate the opening you will leave for the drawstring to go through, on both pieces. My markings are at 3/4″ and 1 1/4″ down from the top of the bag; when I made some bags for children I pushed the second line down an eighth of an inch. Sew the side seam with a half inch allowance, skipping the part between the pins and backstitching on each end of it, and press the seam open.

Fold the top of the bag down a half inch, press, and turn the raw edge under. Press again. I found my sleeve board very helpful for this step.

To keep the seam allowance from poking out the opening when you move the drawstring around, sew it down a bit away from the seam line. I just lined my presser foot edge up with the seam line. If you are putting the drawstring opening on a face of the bag, as in the crane bag, you need only go a bit past the drawstring opening. If you are putting it on a side, as in the three matching bags below, I recommend stitching all the way to the bottom.

For a bag with the opening on a face, flatten the two pieces so the seam line is centered and lay them on top of each other, seam allowances together. Otherwise just line them up with the seam allowances on the same side. Stitch across the bottom at a half inch, and again between that line and the raw edge.

Note that if your two fabrics have different amounts of give or you were less than precise when cutting, you may have slightly different lengths. It is more important that the tops be lined up than the bottoms.

Wrap one piece around the outside of the other and line up the tops, making sure the two drawstring openings match up. Pin and sew around, once close to the edge and once below the drawstring opening. I did the first by lining my presser foot up with the edge of the fabric and putting my needle to the right, and the second by running the edge of the fabric at my 6/8″ mark (the largest my machine has) and putting my needle to the left. Run the drawstring through and you’re done!

I made three matching bags for the three daughters of a friend, and used beads for their initials. There is a baby in the house, so I put Fray Check on the knots below the beads to keep them from coming undone. They have stickers and a few craft supplies.

I also made one with dinosaur fabric on one side and fabric with forks and spoons on the other. Here’s the whole family:

The dinos say “triceratops,” “t rex,” and “long neck.” Either they gave up or they are still mad that brontosaurus has been taken away.

I figure this could be very good for my remnant problem – or it could be very bad.

Sewing machine thread tension was never anything I worried about until about the last two years, when suddenly it seemed to become a huge deal. Machines were skipping stitches, thread was breaking, everything seemed haywire.

As implied by the name, tension is tautness of the thread. On most machines there are two or three metal or plastic disks that you run the top thread between when threading the machine. When the presser foot is up they are loose, and when the presser foot is down they are compressed, by an amount determined by the user. There is also a tension setting for the bobbin thread, but setting it requires a screwdriver and is intended to be done only by sewing machine mechanics. Unless something is wrong with the machine, you’ll be able to adjust the stitching as needed using the top thread tension.

Proper tension means the stitch lines look the same on the top and the bottom, with no looseness, looping, skipped stitches, pull-through, or fabric puckering. To set the tension, start with it at its middle value. Load top and bobbin threads of two different colors into your machine and sew a straight stitch at your usual stitch length on a double-layered fabric of a third color. Choose the fabric to be representative of your usual sewing – I set my tension using calico or muslin. If the stitches look taut, the fabric puckers, the thread breaks, or the bobbin thread pulls through the fabric, decrease the tension. If the stitches look loose or the top thread pulls through the fabric, increase the tension (the top thread pulling through is not much of a problem in most situations, though, as long as it’s not creating actual loops on the back).

Here is an image of my sewing machine’s various settings. It is worth noting that 0 tension really is no tension! You can see that the bobbin thread hasn’t even stayed put in that one. I’m not getting puckering, but the stitch seems to be shorter on higher tension.

More information is obtained if you stitch on the bias instead of with the grain of the fabric. In that case you can also pull the corners of the fabric until the thread breaks; good tension should lead to each thread breaking and in roughly the same place. If only one thread breaks then it is too tight relative to the other. My tension sits at 4, which works well and is the setting my sewing machine mechanic told me is right for my machine. According to this test, though, that’s still too high! Before the breakage test you can see 9 (actually, I think it was 8 and I wrote the wrong number) is too high – the fabric wants to cup.

Then I gave them each a yank; the 1 broke only on the back and the other two only on the front.

Incidentally, I found a page on sewing machine tension that said to adjust your tension only when the presser foot is down, which was echoed by a couple of commenters who said otherwise you will completely wreck up your machine. I have never heard of this in my life, and I have worked in a costume shop and an alteration shop, and discussed tension with a sewing machine mechanic. I did find it mentioned casually in one of my sewing books, but not in my sewing machine manual or this New Mexico State University guide to sewing machine maintenance.

Now, for 90% of projects, you don’t need to touch the tension (mine runs 0 to 9 and I leave it at 4). There are some exceptions.

You may want to decrease the tension if

• You’re working on delicate fabric that puckers easily.
• You’re making a zigzag stitch and the fabric is scrunching.
• You’re using a twin needle to sew and are getting skipped stitches.

I do not know any circumstances under which higher tension is desirable, except perhaps to intentionally scrunch the fabric up.

Tonight I teach my third class at the Sew-Op, and the second that is of my own design. It is a basic course on clothing alterations. The idea is to talk a bit about how clothes go together and about the most common alterations, as well as any tips and tricks I can pass on, and then let the class be guided by the particular interests and needs of the participants. I have a handout that should contain more information than we’re able to really go through in a two-hour class, so they have a reference for future use.

As part of the preparation I also posted a new page, which has been in the works for some time now. You can see it above as “Sewing Tidbits.” It is a sort of glossary, including links to other places with useful information. While the alterations class was the motivation for finishing it, there are non-alteration entries as well.

Looking through my small library of sewing books, it turned out only two were really good for alterations to existing clothes rather than to clothes you are sewing from scratch. One is so out of print Amazon doesn’t even have a front cover image for it: The Complete Book of Sewing, new revised edition with over 750 explanatory pictures, by Constance Talbot, 1943. [I am of the opinion that the best sewing books are from the 40s, 50s, and 60s, after electric sewing machines and mass production were well-established, but while people still made a lot of their own clothing.] Ms. Talbot has an entire section devoted to remaking and remodeling – changing the features of clothing either to eliminate worn parts or update its style. The other book that is good, which is probably not a surprise, is The Costume Technician’s Handbook, by Rosemary Ingram and Liz Covey, 1992 (the link is to a newer edition). This was one of the two textbooks for my Introduction to Costuming class in college, and since theaters often have to contend with low budgets, they have to make costumes work as many times as possible. This book has a thorough section on alterations with many, many pictures. Some of the alteration suggestions aren’t great for personal clothing, because in live theater you know the audience is at least a few feet away at all times so the fine details aren’t as key, but many of them are.

I have some show and tell pieces (“manipulatives,” they would be called in education): some children’s clothes I picked up at the thrift store, a partial pant leg to demonstrate how cuffs go together, and a partial waistband. The cuff and waistband are partially stitched but go together the rest of the way with velcro, so you can undo and redo them.

I’ll share some of the other parts of the class, and things I learned or wrote up while creating the sewing tidbits page, here over the next few posts. Please feel free to ask questions and make requests!

Winter’s dawn makes me think of hats. In the late winter (which here unfortunately extends into April) I will finish my summer hat, I’ve decided. For now I will take a stroll down hat-memory lane.

I have a very large head, so it is rare for a commercial women’s hat to fit me. I had one that was sized M/L (there was also S/M) and it barely fit. I didn’t wear it much because it was snug enough to cause near-instantaneous hathead.

Men’s hats work a little better. In college I had a furry black hat I called the Cossack hat, snitched from my dad, which served me very well until I lost it. I was walking across campus with it under my arm and a large box or something in my hands, dropped it without noticing, and couldn’t find it upon retracing my steps. I have one men’s hat now, the Two Dollah Hat, which is a wide-brimmed straw hat for summer. The fabric summer hat will supplement that in an easier-to-transport fashion.

One of my earliest hatmaking efforts was a patchwork cloche. It was all the same fabric – a wool remnant from my college’s production of King Lear – but the shaping was from patchwork. I freehanded it, abutting the edges and zigzagging them together, shaping it over my knee. I loved that hat though it was not very warm. I can’t remember why I got rid of it; perhaps the wool started bothering my forehead. I seem to be getting more sensitive to it with age.

Later I decided to make a wide-brimmed snow hat. The inspiration was a 1960 photo from my costume history book.

Figure 20-19. Culotte suit by Norman Norell. 1960. (Photograph by Frances McLaughlin-Gill, Vogue). From p. 611 of The History of Costume, 2nd ed, by Payne, Winakor, and Farrell-Beck, copyright 1992, HarperCollins Publishers.

I mostly like the way it turned out, but the outside and inside didn’t fit together properly, so I had to open up the inside to match and then add a padded roll to the base of the hat to get it to fit my head. Needing to make a hat smaller to fit me is a novel experience. I still like the hat, though. The lining is a dark green satin and the blue ribbon just above the brim was given to me on a birthday gift from a high school friend who shared my birthday. There is a little snowflake charm sewn front and center, that for some reason people fixate on. One person: “oh look, you have a little asterisk!” Another person: “and all the snow goes zzzzzzip! (pokes charm) and sticks right here.” This gray wool is likely also a remnant from King Lear, although I don’t remember for sure.

My biggest (and only successful?) knitting adventure was a big winter hat. I should have pre-washed the yarn, since it got very loose and floppy when I washed it after making it, but it still does the job. I knitted a very large rectangle, sewed it into a cylinder, gathered each open end tightly so it was more football-shaped, put one end inside to meet the other and sewed them together, and then folded up the opposite (already-doubled) edge to form a brim. The doubled gathered points sit at the crown of my head.

Most recently (previous to the current summer hat efforts) I made a fleece hat. I was away from home for the fall semester, and part of my fitness efforts was going to be jumping rope in the backyard of the place I was staying. I knew I would be too warm in my full winter gear, but I figured a hat and gloves would keep me warm enough while I was warming up through activity. I bought a pair of lightweight knit gloves but decided to make the hat, so one Friday after work I bought a remnant of shark-print fleece and a bag of big plastic buttons. I didn’t have my nice shears or a sewing machine, so I cut everything with small scissors and hand-sewed it. I was done by Saturday evening. It didn’t fit as snugly as I’d intended, but it was good enough (at least with the grabbiness of fleece) to stay on. And who wouldn’t want a shark hat?

It has occurred to me I ought to crochet myself a hat that is dressier than Shark Hat, warmer than the snow hat, and less bulky than the knit hat. You know, in my copious free time.

This continues the post from three weeks ago.

When our story left off, the coat had some tricot interfacing ironed into the back and new outer buttons sewn on. The lining had been removed and half of it disassembled, and paper pattern pieces made with a half-inch seam allowance.

This time around I cleaned off my dining table, which is not so easy on the back as a cutting table but is the only sufficiently large surface to use, laid out the fabric and cut my pieces. Using the un-disassembled side of the original lining as a guide, I distributed them into a left half pile and a right half pile.

Now, patterns that are sold come with all kinds of markings to let you know what attaches where and how. Homemade patterns from a disassembled garment do not. Sometimes I just had to plunge on and trust all would work out, as in the first picture below, which looked questionable but turned into the second picture below.

In constructing the lining, I was concerned about two things: getting the pieces mixed up left/right, and setting the sleeves in correctly. For the first one I just made sure to sew the two halves together individually before sewing the center back seam (in a commercial pattern the steps would almost certainly be to assemble the back, side, and front pieces, and then assemble the sleeves, and then set the sleeves into the armholes). That let me maintain two separate piles. For the second, I started out by eyeballing the original lining for how much distance was between the seams of the armhole pieces and the seams of the side body pieces (it was convenient that the sleeve was two separate pieces). After doing one, I measured and made the other match, though it took me two attempts to mirror-image myself and do it correctly (fortunately only pinning was involved).

I ran into an unexpected issue: my sleeves were much larger than my armholes. Not by an unreasonable amount, but far more than I expected. I did the Lazy Gather: pin smooth until some reasonable distance away from the shoulder seam (about 3″ on each side), and then by folding find the centers and pin them together, find the centers of each half and pin them together, and repeat until you have it pinned at reasonable intervals (after the first two rounds I eyeballed the centers instead of folding to find them). The bumps sew down into little pleats, but no one is going to see the shoulders of my coat lining so I didn’t care.

The fabric was much less stiff than I thought it would be. For a while I was afraid it was going to be the kind of fabric that never stays squared and is miserable to sew, because you have to square it up and then pin it every centimeter to get clean stitch lines. Fortunately it was not so bad, though it did fray a fair bit. After sewing my seams I zigzagged the seam allowances, and then zigzagged all the raw edges.

My last lining-only step was to put the pleat into the center back that had been in the original. Since lining is typically made out of non-stretchy fabric, ease is added to the lining via extra size, which is then pleated or gathered down to match the outer fabric. If you didn’t add some ease, you would find your mobility restricted. Here’s the finished but uninserted lining.

If this were a blouse, I would run away. But it made me excited as a lining!

Next came putting the lining into the coat, and this is where I found myself relying on my deconstruction photos. I decided the best order would be to sew the lining in at the top and slightly down the front opening, then do the sleeves, then figure out the hem, and finally finish sewing the lining at the front opening. In hindsight, it would perhaps have been easier to do the sleeves first, but I was worried I would get them attached all twisted around.

I did the first step and then put the sleeve linings down into the sleeves and hung up the coat to check their orientation. Glory hallelujiah, the coat sleeves were in two pieces also, and the seams were meant to match up (I later realized I had this information in photo form). Time to put them together. But how? There are not many lined jackets in my life, so this was a skill I had not exercised since I was seamstressing for a living. I stood there talking to myself – “do you have to do them from the outside? but no, then it would be a loop and you’d never get it right side out” – and figured it out. In the first picture below, the sleeves are lying with their shoulder sides together. In the second, I slid the lining up a bit and folded up the coat sleeve, and that is how they are supposed to meet.

To pin them I folded the lining up a bit at the cuff and slid it inside the coat cuff, as in the third picture above. After stitching that seam I folded the coat cuff up on its existing fold line and hand-sewed the edge to the two seams to keep it up.

Before sewing the rest of the front seams I wanted to hem the lining. I’m glad I allowed 1 1/2″ in the pattern, because I only folded up 1″ in the center back. It was 1 1/2″ on the outside edges, though I could have gotten away with less, I think. I didn’t do an invisible hem, just a regular machine hem (I really kind of hate hand-hemming). Then the last attachment to the flaps folded in from the front of the coat, and hand-tacking those flaps to the outside of the coat at the bottom.

After the lining was in I could sew in the interior button. As it turned out, I had two interior buttonholes, and just the one interior button. So I dug into my grandmother’s button box (magical wonderland that it is) and replaced the ugly clear plastic button with two black buttons.

Unfortunately it took me two tries to sew one of the buttons on, and it ended up slightly off from where it was supposed to be. It still works, and I don’t often use the inside buttons anyway, so in the interest of not sewing it a third time I just left it.

After the buttons the only thing left was a swing tack to keep the back hem of the lining in the vicinity of the back hem of the coat. I think I’ll make a separate post on swing tacks; they’re worth knowing about.

Lastly, for completeness, I put my pin back on. This pin was a gift from a dear friend, who got it at a Chicago art gallery or museum. It’s an Edward Gorey drawing that made him think of Where the Wild Things Are, which made him think of me. I had removed it, but it so perfectly fits this coat’s lapel that I was very happy to reinstate it.