sewing bird

[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/2FK3Uf7

I need a sewing clamp. I only just found out they existed and now I don’t know how I ever lived without one and cannot do so for a moment longer.

They were mentioned in the sewing manual I bought myself for my birthday but I didn’t really get what it meant and sort of glossed over it but then I saw one listed in that auction and I was like what is that (they called it a quilting bird, which isn’t the right term for it but if you google hard enough you’ll find sewing birds).

It doesn’t look like anyone makes any that are really similar to the old ones. There’s a thing available on Amazon and a couple other places that is annoyingly like… the part that clamps to a table, and then a piece of shitty string, and then a metal clamp. And that’s fine but not really. What I want is like the classic sewing bird where it attaches to the table and then is a solid piece that goes up a slight distance and has a clamp and often also has a pincushion attached to it. That would be so perfect!! That’s what I want.

They’re ludicrously expensive antiques. I don’t want a ludicrously expensive antique because I am going to lose this fucking thing in no time flat.

What I probably have to do is make my own. I can like. Buy a clamp and a clip and get a piece of wood and screw them to one another and then glue a pincushion onto it.

I guess I’m not amazed that nobody’s making nice reasonably-priced non-precious functional reproductions because this is exclusively useful when hand-sewing especially long straight seams and nobody does that in this modern era of uh like sewing machines and such.

But I’m doing a pojagi-style https://www.epidastudio.com/traditional-unlined-pojagi-tutorial/ pride flag out of silk habotai I dyed last week and what I need more than anything is a sewing bird to hold it for me.

[image description: six different colors of dyed silk overlaid over each other, purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red.]

Good news: I have a clip-on USB-powered fan and I have discovered that I can sort of more or less use that, though it’s not ideal, so that’s how I’m going to get through this, probably.

[image description: a black plastic fan is clipped to a vertical piece of wood comprising the side of an antique night stand: held in the clip is a length of orange silk overlaid over a piece of red silk with a bit of red silk thread stitched through joining them together]

i mean sometimes you just gotta make do i guess but how rad would it be to have something little and cute. I used to own a shitload of different kinds of clamps for yurt-related purposes but I’ll give you like three guesses what happened to all of those when my yurt burned down.