9. making: January 2008 Archives
As mentioned last week, I did some organizing of the projects that are floating around my craft room and my head and here are three that floated up to the top of the list. (By the way, I have had another big project going on for a while now - reorganizing former Office room to Craft/Guest room. I have been close to finishing it for a couple of weeks now, and I am determined it is going to be this week.) The pink fabrics are a pillow I had in mind ever since I saw a quilt made of strips in one of Kaffee Fasset's book (I believe it was the Museum Quilts?). It was actually a back of a quilt and it was made of long strips of coordinating fabrics with large floral print.
The brown fabrics is for another pillow - the bottom fabrics has a large print of off-white leaves on brown background. The top fabric is for the binding.
And finally the light green pile is flannel squares I cut up almost a year ago for a puffy quilt. I cut up 35 squares for the top out of coordinating green flannel, and 35 squares for the bottom - for the bottom I used cotton because I was afraid that the seams would be too thick. The bottom squares are 7x7 in, the top squares are 71/2x71/2 in.
I found two different ways of constructing a puffy quilt. In the first method, you sew rows of squares together, closing them on three sides, leaving one side open for stuffing. Then you stuff them, close the sides, and sew the rows together. In the other method, you simply sew all the squares together and then tear a small opening on the back, stuff them, and whip stitch the tear. In both cases, once the squares are connected and stuffed, you put the backing and binding and you are done.
I opted for the second method - I thought it would be easier to stuff the squares after they are all sewn together, then to sew strips of stuffed squares together. The first picture above shows what the quilt looked like before stuffing. And the second is a closeup of the back (before I added the flannel backing) - you can see I made a little hole in the middle of the square, stuffed it and stitched it all back together. It did not take that much time (not more than when you are aligning layers of fabric when doing a "regular" quilt.
This is the finished quilt (actually almost finished - there is no binding in this picture). It is quite heavy - maybe I stuffed the squares a bit too much, but I figured the stuffing will settle over time. When I showed it to Luka, he was excited and wanted to take it with him Saturday when we went sledding, but then the next day he did not want to put it in his tent - he opted for many pillows. He said that this "blanket" would be for the baby. OK then!
This is the finished quilt (actually almost finished - there is no binding in this picture). It is quite heavy - maybe I stuffed the squares a bit too much, but I figured the stuffing will settle over time. When I showed it to Luka, he was excited and wanted to take it with him Saturday when we went sledding, but then the next day he did not want to put it in his tent - he opted for many pillows. He said that this "blanket" would be for the baby. OK then!
This is what I have been playing with today. My Christmas present - White Serger 2500. I was using the threads it came with - I will be attempting to thread the thing some other time. But I tried the basic overlock stitch with 4 threads as well as adding elastic to the fabric. You can see what the edges look like below. Perfect.
This is sooo much easier than with a sewing machine! Now, don't get me wrong - the sewing machine is not going anywhere, but for knit fabrics (like the one in these images), adding elastic, picot edges... I will be using this puppy. I have a great Singer, but it just does not handle knit or stretchy fabrics well. It is supposed to be able to do a double needle, and it has another single needle stitch for stretchy fabrics - but whatever I tried it stretches the fabric too much while sewing and the end result is not pretty. This will work very well.
So what I made? Two changing pad covers - I cannot really model them because the old changing pad is in the trash, but, apart from cutting the fabric, it takes maybe 15 minutes to serge the four corners and add elastic around. And the edges are all finished nicely. Can't beat that!
