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furoshiki cont’d
Dec. 9th, 2019 02:53 pmvia https://ift.tt/2PtCifq
Image description: solid gray and solid navy blue fabric jumbled up on a lap, with hand-stitched running stitch hems visible in blue on the gray, and gray on the blue, and a hand needle sticking out threaded with the gray thread.
This one’s made from bits of two old sheets, pieced, assembled on the serger and then topstitched and hemmed down by hand in blue silk and gray linen thread. The gray sheet’s a horrible polyester though, I ruined my first attempt by trying to iron it and it melted! So I couldn’t press the seams and had to just hold them down by hand. We’ll see how it holds up to a washing.
image description: the same fabric from above, but folded neatly, showing the intersection of the blue and gray fabric and the parallel lines of contrasting running stitch on each side.
The blue stitches there are functional, holding the serged seam allowance underneath to one side, but the gray is just decorative. The whole thing is wildly not actually square or straight at all, but I’m presuming that doesn’t matter. Any real Japanese person would be horrified but I’m not striving for authenticity here. You can also see on the underside of the gray corner, there, how I serged the raw edges and then folded them under, and the serging is still kind of showing a little. Listen, I’m not entering this in an SCA arts and sciences thing; if I were, I wouldn’t have used old polyester bedsheets.
image description: a rainbow unicorn head needle holder stuck to a plastic box lid, covered in glass-head pins and a needle, with the edge of the gray fabric nearly overshadowing it.
My middle-little sister gave me one of these needle holder things. That’s great, except that if you sew primarily garments, you don’t, uh, usually put them into an embroidery hoop to work on them? So a needle holder, which is designed to attach to your work in a hoop, isn’t… super functional.
But I instantly lost the rear magnet– it flung itself wildly into the couch, and I found three hairpins and a very good pair of scissors, but not the magnet– and so I went and got a stronger rear magnet and managed to get the thing to adhere to a nearby plastic box lid, which happily gives me a spot to stick my needles. It seems to work so far, and is extremely appropriate for my haphazard-at-best work habits. So we’ll see! I’d been sad to think how I could never use this thing that my sister had such good intentions about (I guess she doesn’t know that you don’t sew clothes in an embroidery hoop? She does cross stitch and knitting so it’s not like she’d know, I guess), and I’m glad I could improvise, adapt, overcome.
image description: A swathe of pink fabric with lighter pink next to it, crumpled to show some extremely shitty fluorescent pink machine stitching with trailing loose threads coming out. In the background is a hank of embroidery floss, a nice skein of pastel rainbow embroidery floss, and a nearly-empty spool of white silk handsewing thread.
This is my example of why the fuck I’m doing hand-topstitching. A little of this is my carelessness but the vast majority of this shittiness is that my fucking shitty sewing machine can’t fucking straight-stitch anymore without throwing a fit every forty-five seconds. Fuck that thing straight into the sun.
As a side note, the darker pink fabric is an old button-down shirt of my grandmother’s that got passed to me and i tried to re-dye it anything but grungy pastel pink and got… vibrant pastel pink. So like. Not my style but a nice fabric, I’ve used bits of it in other projects and I’m glad to pass the last of it along in something like this.
Future generations may puzzle over my niece’s possessions and be like huh somebody made this by hand at home, possibly while possessed? Neat, the serger edges mean it must be Great-Aunt B, she loved sewing and had a terrible case of demons. (Definitely wasn’t great-great-grandma, she never finished a seam in her goddamn life but also knew how to topstitch.)
Image description: solid gray and solid navy blue fabric jumbled up on a lap, with hand-stitched running stitch hems visible in blue on the gray, and gray on the blue, and a hand needle sticking out threaded with the gray thread.
This one’s made from bits of two old sheets, pieced, assembled on the serger and then topstitched and hemmed down by hand in blue silk and gray linen thread. The gray sheet’s a horrible polyester though, I ruined my first attempt by trying to iron it and it melted! So I couldn’t press the seams and had to just hold them down by hand. We’ll see how it holds up to a washing.
image description: the same fabric from above, but folded neatly, showing the intersection of the blue and gray fabric and the parallel lines of contrasting running stitch on each side.
The blue stitches there are functional, holding the serged seam allowance underneath to one side, but the gray is just decorative. The whole thing is wildly not actually square or straight at all, but I’m presuming that doesn’t matter. Any real Japanese person would be horrified but I’m not striving for authenticity here. You can also see on the underside of the gray corner, there, how I serged the raw edges and then folded them under, and the serging is still kind of showing a little. Listen, I’m not entering this in an SCA arts and sciences thing; if I were, I wouldn’t have used old polyester bedsheets.
image description: a rainbow unicorn head needle holder stuck to a plastic box lid, covered in glass-head pins and a needle, with the edge of the gray fabric nearly overshadowing it.
My middle-little sister gave me one of these needle holder things. That’s great, except that if you sew primarily garments, you don’t, uh, usually put them into an embroidery hoop to work on them? So a needle holder, which is designed to attach to your work in a hoop, isn’t… super functional.
But I instantly lost the rear magnet– it flung itself wildly into the couch, and I found three hairpins and a very good pair of scissors, but not the magnet– and so I went and got a stronger rear magnet and managed to get the thing to adhere to a nearby plastic box lid, which happily gives me a spot to stick my needles. It seems to work so far, and is extremely appropriate for my haphazard-at-best work habits. So we’ll see! I’d been sad to think how I could never use this thing that my sister had such good intentions about (I guess she doesn’t know that you don’t sew clothes in an embroidery hoop? She does cross stitch and knitting so it’s not like she’d know, I guess), and I’m glad I could improvise, adapt, overcome.
image description: A swathe of pink fabric with lighter pink next to it, crumpled to show some extremely shitty fluorescent pink machine stitching with trailing loose threads coming out. In the background is a hank of embroidery floss, a nice skein of pastel rainbow embroidery floss, and a nearly-empty spool of white silk handsewing thread.
This is my example of why the fuck I’m doing hand-topstitching. A little of this is my carelessness but the vast majority of this shittiness is that my fucking shitty sewing machine can’t fucking straight-stitch anymore without throwing a fit every forty-five seconds. Fuck that thing straight into the sun.
As a side note, the darker pink fabric is an old button-down shirt of my grandmother’s that got passed to me and i tried to re-dye it anything but grungy pastel pink and got… vibrant pastel pink. So like. Not my style but a nice fabric, I’ve used bits of it in other projects and I’m glad to pass the last of it along in something like this.
Future generations may puzzle over my niece’s possessions and be like huh somebody made this by hand at home, possibly while possessed? Neat, the serger edges mean it must be Great-Aunt B, she loved sewing and had a terrible case of demons. (Definitely wasn’t great-great-grandma, she never finished a seam in her goddamn life but also knew how to topstitch.)
