Monday, February 11, 2013

I sewed something yall

 I was crafty this weekend! My aunt gave me a Brother 2010 sewing machine in the cabinet around Christmastime. I didn't want to get too involved with learning about it or start any projects until after the craziness of the holidays, then the wedding, and then my parents being in town. But I picked up some more supplies last week with a little surplus in my "fun-money," and got to work on some cloth napkins!

Jeff and I have mentioned that we'd like to find ways to cut back on our paper waste around the house, and I found a great tutorial on cloth napkins that outlined them as a great project to practice sewing straight lines and the art of mitered corners. I didn't plan a blog post on the project, so I only have a few pictures that I took with my smartphone to send to a few of my craftier friends.

I didn't want to spend money on fabric because I'm cheap, this is my first project and therefore might be a little messy, and these are only going to be used by us at home. I figured that if the project was fun enough, I'd work on more sets later on, some nicer ones for home and perhaps a few gift sets in my friends' favorite colors. So rather than purchase fabric, I broke down an old set of full sheets and pillowcases for my napkin material. The fabric is already washed, shrunk, super soft and should stand up well to multiple washings.

I started by using my awesome rotary cutter set to cut 17" squares. I was able to get two from each of my two pillowcases, so four floral squares, and easily got 16 solid green squares from the top sheet after I'd ironed it and cut the hemmed edges. Cutting the edges was pointless because I would have trimmed them with the cuts I used to square the pieces. I can't imagine how long it would have taken to mark and cut perfect squares with only my shears. I now understand why the rotary cutter, mat, and ruler are essential to quilters.

After my squares were cut, I laid the ruler diagonally across the squares and marked my fabric 1-1/2" in on each corner. I looked at a ton of different ways to do mitered corners, but this advice on the Fiskars website seemed more simple, and I was excited to use my rotary cutter for more snips!






The picture above is the wrong side of one of my floral squares from the pillowcases. Below is one of the squares from the green sheet. These squares had no right side or wrong side, which made things even easier. Yay! After marking the 1-1/2" corner marks, I turned the ruler diagonally and lined it up with the inch marks on the mat to cut 1/2" corners off the squares. This removes excess fabric that can make your corners look jacked. I was following the tutorial's advice to square the fabric, mark it 1" in on each side of the corner, and then use those marks to snip your corner. But I'm using a regular inkpen because our local Wal-Mart doesn't have any sewing pens, and it eventually left a mark on the mat that I could see.






Above is the square laid out with the ruler indicating the corner I'm about to cut free. I was sad when I finished cutting and realized it was time to iron and sew. Cutting is so fun with the rotary tool and mat. Jeff was amazed by the self-healing mat.

It took me three hours to get my machine to stitch! I'd messed around with it a few times in January, then had my aunt show me again how to thread the top and load the bobbin when she visited a few weekends ago. But I still kept getting it wrong. Twice I got up, quit, and walked away. But then I'd settle into my huff on the couch and look at youtube, and eventually was able to piece together the right advice from several videos about other models. There aren't many videos online for my model, and Brother doesn't offer the manual online like it does for so many others.

Once I figured the machine out, I felt confident to start pressing my hems since I'd be able to stitch them right afterwards. I folded each corner into that little mark from earlier, which ended up being about 1/4" hem. My iron is awesome for pressing. I love it. I had to refill the water after each napkin, but I guess it's normal for an iron to steam through that much water quickly. After pressing in each corner, I pressed the edges in 1/4", starting on one side and working counter-clockwise around my square. I did both folds on each side at once, and now that I'm thinking about it, I remember reading that it's better to first fold the first hem all the way around, and then go around again with the second fold. I'll do that with my next batch. Spoiler alert: I only finished two napkins yesterday. Eighteen to go haha.

I liked the way the corners came together once I had all my hems pressed. None of them were perfect, but I'll get better as I get more practice. It was my first time stitching anything other than practice seams on the machine, too, so while the stitching isn't very pretty (and I still can't figure out how to get my stitch to zig-zag... it's set on zig-zag but still stitching straight), I know that will improve greatly with time too.

Here it is: my first mitered corner!




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