Archive / Sewing

Chain piecing blooper

I’m a fan of chain piecing. It is quick, thread saving and also saves me the hassle of trimming/tossing those long tails of threads.

This week, I resuscitated a 2.5 year-old WIP that has all the pieces prepped and all ready to go. So I sat down to start working on the 1st step that called for 120 small blocks. I was feeding the patches almost brainlessly for about 30 mins and I thought: “The machine sounds a little weird. Need to put some oil when I reload the bobbin”. And then I stood up to stretch my legs and admire the long chain behind to machine to find that… there’s NO chain! I was probably ‘air-sewing’ for the past 10 mins or so, pushing patches through the footer when I had already ran out of bobbin thread!

ARGH. I cleaned out the machine, fitted in a loaded bobbin and said Good Night. The next evening, I started over again and took time to glance BEHIND the footer once in a while. 😉

Do you know the Bernina 820 has a great bobbin warning feature that tells you that you are running low on your bobbin thread. And that each jumbo bobbin has a capacity about 40% more than the normal ones.

It’s Invi-zipper

I have a couple of 26″ throw pillows in our room and making pillow covers for them helps to free up some space in the fabric drawers. I HAVE to make space because I’m expecting a really sweet delivery of fabrics in August. Yaay!

Bought my concealed zip footer from Rosie earlier this year and I finally bust it out of its packaging to try it out for the 1st time. It was really quick and easy and involved less steps, compared to installing a regular zipper. A couple of good reference posts: Sew Katie Did and Kirin Notebook.

Here are the appliqued pillow covers that I made for my sister & her husband last Christmas with some really cool houndstooth fabric. Made with regular zippers (the ones where the zipper tab clicks back into the zip). And I have to say that the serger really helps to make these home decor projects a breeze as it helps to provide that lovely professional finish that hides all the imperfection that is my sewing 😉

And on an incredibly lazy Sunday, I received a delivery (!) of goodies at my door. I bought some fabrics from Hancock’s of Paducah a couple of months ago when they had the offer of free international shipping, but there were delays due to backorder items, etc… so I actually FORGOT that I made this purchase and was pleasantly surprised to receive this package. Sweet!

And Fusible Batting! I don’t know if I will use it on a large quilt – I don’t fancy wielding a hot iron and crawling all over the quilt sandwich. Will likely try this out on smaller projects first.

Ouch. He got me…

For months now, Benji (our 4 YO) has this annoying habit of giving loud pretend burps before announcing that he is done with his meal and ready to leave the table.

Our regular response: Ahhh… you burped! No lego for you!.

The other day, Benji caught me burping as I walked up the stairs.

He exclaimed: Mummy! No more FABRICS for you!

Ouch….

Luke – The quilt

This is my “Luke Quilt” that was requested by a good friend last year. I delivered some goodies to her first and then went on to drag my feet for another 12 months before I finished the quilt for ‘not-so-baby-now Luke’.

This baby quilt – a single Log Cabin block, is a huge 50″ square that took about 2 solid days of quilting that my left my arms aching quite a bit. The puffiness of some of the sections here are due to the fact that it came out of the dryer in the morning and I left it folded until I took the shots.

I used some of my precious Japanese fabrics that we hand-carried back to Singapore, and also Denyse Schmidt’s lovely prints. It has ‘Lego-like’ bricks, space shuttles, transportation prints and lots of dots, stripes and plaids.

For the back, I pieced the left-over prints from the front with Kona Essex Linen – Solid White. The white linen really showed off the variegated quilting thread that I used on this quilt.

According to the mummy, Luke took this quilt to bed the very night I delivered it to their home.

Wishing you many sweet dreams with this quilt, Luke!

Gone quilting

Been sewing more than blogging. Good thing, I say.

And in a bid to clear out more space, I revisited my oldest quilting WIP – the beginner quilt that I started at Quilts and friends in late 2006.

The quilting stitches vary across the quilt – the earlier quilting were longer and the most recent ones are shorter. At one stage, I wanted to send it out to be finished by another quilter as I was pretty tired of this bundle taking up space in my cupboard. But over the weekend, I used my brand new Karisma pencils and finished marking the quilting lines in a jiffy. One of the reasons (or excuses) why I put it away was that I had a hard time marking the quilts with fabric pencils that broke so easily – at one point I swore I was sharpening the pencils more than marking the fabrics, and also finding a colour that shows up well.

Only borders to go now! Yaay!