Experiments in Applique

I’ve never appliqued anything before - it seemed, well … it seemed like too much trouble.  Me = occasionally lazy.  But yesterday I spent all day sewing, and I thought, well, what the hey?

So I made a cover for my sewing machine (and a seat cushion, but it’s not done yet) out of the leftover fabric from the crochet accessory holders I made a while back.  Actually, I just found the post for that project, and it tells me it was last July 24.  I can’t believe it was that long ago that I made those.  I was sure it was just October or something.

The fact that I’ve had that project sitting on my shelf for almost 9 months is scary.  On the other hand, going back through my blog like that I’m amazed at all the things I’ve done.  Sometimes, it would probably be helpful for me to go back and read what I’ve written and posted.  I appear to be somewhat busy.  Not quite sure where I got the time to do all that.

So here’s the cover, which is part of my plan to make my sewing area decorations & furnishings purple and green with flowers:

It has lavender quilted fabric with appliqued strips of the purple-green flower fabric.  This lovely cover features no pattern, some alarmingly crooked seams, and wonky applique.  However, I think it is perfectly serviceable, not too bad looking and  turned out surprisingly well for sorta making it up as I went along, and having only fabric scraps to work with.  Oh, and bias tape that was too thin.

Like I said, I’m practicing applique, so this seemed a good thing to test stuff on.  The larger applique is fabric on green felt.  I hate ironing this kind of tiny little curved edge fold-under.  HATE IT.  No wonder I haven’t done this before.

The smaller one is the same fabric-on-felt, except instead of turning the fabric edges under I used my machine’s satin stitch to embroider the edges and offset the fabrics.  I liked the way that one turned out better.  First time I’d used the satin stitch on my machine, too.  Interesting.  Must experiment further.

I’m off to camping this weekend, so I shall see you all on Monday!  Happy weekend!

Ever heard of needle punch embroidery?

Today’s another show-and-tell, this time from Jeff’s grandmother. It seems that Dolly was like many a crafter - she collected stuff, and she held onto what she didn’t use. A couple of weekends ago his mom and I went through the boxes of things she had collected to see what was what. I love other people’s collections of crafting paraphernalia, particularly when some of it is rather old. You never know what kinds of designs and crafts you’re going to find.

So here’s a few things from her collection, a collection not unlike many crafters. It’s not huge (well, her button collection is) but it’s representative of someone with many interests, and it’s representative of several decades, too. It’s it many ways a typical stash, one that brings back memories for the people who know it. My husband remembers his grandmother embroidering with that thread, and she made him a shirt from that blue plaid material with pearl buttons.

I think maybe I like this picture the best, because it has memory for me, even though I wasn’t around for this … Those yarn potholder-type-hotpads are something that Jeff and I got from his grandmother’s friend Lola for our wedding. The fabric is still neatly packaged, very much a project for a busy woman. The type of embroidery hoops there tell me when they were purchased - they don’t actually hold fabric that well, but I’ll tell you, they’re going to make awesome frames. And the Star Trek pin is pure grandson - Dolly saved three of his Star Trek pins

Tools are always great - crafting mostly takes tools of some sort, and so you can really tell what sorta things somebody did by their tools. What they were interested in, what they used a lot, what they thought about and never did. Painting, crochet, beading, tatting, knitting … I’m definitely going to have to learn to tat now.

My favorite of the bunch is definitely this bonnet. Jeff’s mom actually found 2 different bonnets.

This bonnet is the one that still has color in the fabric, obviously a nice, ruffled bonnet for good use. I find it interesting that you can totally take it apart with the buttons. When I tried it on, the brim was so huge that if fell down over my nose.
But you can see the strength of the sun in these babies. The other one has almost no color left.

Each has a wide brim and a long collar to keep the sun off. The other one actually has about 15 little pockets in the brim for cardboard pieces! The cardboard is replaceable, and it keeps the big floppy brim off your face! Ingenious!

These are truly fabulous. Maybe I just used to like Little House on the Prairie a lot, but … it’s a bonnet!

Oh, oh, and needle punch embroidery? I’d never heard of it before, but here it is. I even have a needle and some fabric and designs. I have no idea what this really is, but apparently there’s still a lot of people doing it. You never know, maybe it will be the Next Big Thing.

I should not be writing this post

This morning at 5:30 a.m. when in the grips of an insomnia so irritating as to actually get me out of my warm bed, I decided that I would swear off the internet forever.  I was going to delete every vestige of all my online accounts, and erase every bit of me in the ether!

I think it goes without saying that I am not very at all rational in the early morning before noon. I’m still not really sure why I thought this was a good idea, other than that I was exhausted, grumpy and needed a nice hot shower and a cuppa joe.

I’m not yet over conference-malaise, and I should just go to bed, and that’s not really too far off.  I just want to go to bed late enough that I can sleep for a good 11 hours tonight straight through.

So in this week’s now-typical style, I present various things running through my head:

1)  Remember that picture I showed you of the woman knitting socks in the SXSW panel? Well, I posted that picture to Flickr, and lo and behold she left a comment!  It’s Julia aka Yarn Maven from Bastrop, Texas.  I didn’t get a chance to get her name in the panel because I got caught up talking to the two founders of BurdaStyle, but I’m so glad to meet her.

2)  I do yammer on sometimes about advocating buying handmade stuff.  But it’s only because I really like it.  Fun thing about buying things I might make myself - still useful, but this way I get to enjoy others’ design aesthetics as well.  Here’s my latest purchases.

On the left is the orange Bouquet wall clock for Jeff’s study from Decoy Lab.  He’s been on an orange thing recently, looking for accessories.  Orange is a great accent.  As seen on February’s Poppytalk selections.

On the right is a sewing case I bought for taking embroidery stuff along with me.  It’s from Blue Banana Shop in Singapore, whose stuff is very bright and cheery.

Pay no attention to my strange collection of books there.  I just realized what those were.  This is part of my collection of academic books on the old Testament.  The one on the far left, Paul the Convert, was written by a professor for whom I was a teaching assistant, my favorite professor from grad school, the inimitable Alan Segal.