sewing Archives - Page 33 of 42

Business dinosaurs

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!

Ulu knife sheath

I’ve shown my Ulu knife on here before. It’s fun but it is hard to store. For Christmas I asked for an Ulu knife sheath, but my mother decided to spend her Christmas budget on other things, so I got this:

My father was still amusedly shaking his head at the whole thing, but he was conscripted to help. Mother included a tracing of an Ulu knife in the kit, so I cut that out, traced it onto the leather, and added a seam allowance to the curved edges. Dad cut the pieces out for me with a utility knife and lent me his leather punch. I used one of the purse straps to make a strap for holding the blade in.

The purse instructions said to use saddle stitch for most everything, which is just double running stitch (Holbein) simultaneously with both ends of the same thread. I followed those instructions and then sewed the strap on afterward. To make the open edge (necessary to get the knife in and out) look the same I did a double running stitch on each side individually.

At this point I had to pause until I got home to my actual knife. I wanted the strap to hold it in snugly, so I didn’t want to guess on positioning the closure. Retroactively (by an hour or two) it became Craft Countdown #1. I determined where to cut the strap and epoxied black velcro to each side.

It fits really well. Now I can stash it in a drawer!

Tidbits, Supplemental

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…