Monthly Archives: November 2011

corners of my home, pt 2

This Thanksgiving weekend is spent not celebrating traditionally, but chatting with far-away family with the use of webcam-wonders, and being thankful even with the absence of turkeys, mashed potatoes, cranberries, and all the other fixings.

I still feel like we’re setting up house here, and we’re still waiting for the rest of our things to arrive. But I am glad for some little things – a full tea set in the thinnest porcelain, inherited from a favorite great-aunt; some beautiful colored glass stemware; a little ceramic dish for a little bar of hand-soap, making something utilitarian in the kitchen feel a little more aesthetically pleasing. So while we’re patiently waiting for the rest of our settling to happen, it is calming to have some things in order.

my portfolio

Some people might have noticed I have updated and tweaked the blog a little lately, including a new button, “portfolio”. You see, I’ve gotten my portfolio website up and running!

This is where I’ve collected a lot of my projects, both school-related and professional. I didn’t build the website from the ground up, but I certainly did a lot of tweaking to make it work more like I wanted it to. It was frustrating to the point of pulling my hair out and screaming at times, but it ended up looking pretty nice, if I may say so!

Go check it out!

using the fabric scraps

I can’t stand waste. More specifically, I can’t stand being wasteful. I don’t know if the mild hoarding is the source, or the consequence of this aversion to throwing away anything that could possibly be useful, but here I am – constantly with drawers and boxes and surfaces covered in things that surely will be useful – somehow, sometime.

Setting up in a new apartment always feels like a new start, so spurred on by that, I’ve come up with a way of making at least some of my hoarded materials turn useful. I’m sure I’m not the only one with scraps of fabric left over after sewing projects – too big to throw away (too beautiful!), but too small to be put to use in a garment. Some people make small things; pincushions, coin-purses, soft toys – but I mostly make garments, and these pieces aren’t even large enough for pockets. I finally realized the perfect use for these scraps was to make bias tape!

I make my bias tape by measuring the same amount (say, 3 inches) along two sides of a triangle – along the weft and the warp grain. Connecting those two points gives me the bias, and then I can just use my ruler to draw new diagonal marks. This works well on oddly shaped scrappy pieces, but I’ve found that my lines can get a little skewed after four or five repeats – best to double-check my lines every so often!

One trick to getting perfectly aligned seams when joining pieces is to make sure the short ends are at a 45 degree angle to the long ends, which they will be if they follow the grainlines to begin with. Sometimes it’s easier to trim the scrap piece of fabric first. The other trick is to mark the seam allowance, and offset the two pieces so that it’s the stitching line goes edge to edge on both layers.

It’s kind of amazing how many yards of bias tape you can get out of a fat quarter sized scrap (or smaller!) of fabric.

I think I’ve been fooling myself with my mindset of “this can be useful somehow!”. Sure, most of the things we having lying in drawers and boxes can be useful, but are they useful to us – in the way that we use things? Like I mentioned, I don’t really sew or make small things, so smallish scraps of fabric don’t hold any value to me, at least not in how I craft. So while someone else might have found a million things to make with my scraps, I didn’t. By making these remnants into bias-tape, I’ve turned them into something I will actually use – something that makes sense with the kinds of things I craft. And that is the whole point, isn’t it?

And what will I use my bias tape for? I took a workshop a while back where I learned lots of finishing techniques, like hong-kong hemming, bound seams, and decorative uses. Quilts can be finished with some home-made bias tape; use it for a decorative piping touch, and my favorite, a really nice edge finishing from Tasia of sewaholic.

sewing underwear: the extras

After sharing an underwear pattern, and some basics of how to sew underwear (well, at least how I do it! There are many ways that are all right. If it works, it’s right. That is what Elizabeth Zimmerman taught me), I wanted to show some other types of elastic you can use.

But first, a word of warning! See how the fabric is twisting and the underwear looks crooked? That is because I didn’t take my own advice about following the grainlines of the fabric! So don’t do what I did.

FO, or fold-over elastic
Fold-over elastic is a type of underwear elastic that is slightly shiny on one side, and has a faint grove in the middle. The grove is a handy guide in folding the elastic in half, and makes it easy to have an even amount of elastic on either side, as well as finishing the inside and the outside. This wasn’t the stretchiest elastic I’ve worked with, so I’d stretch it more than usual while sewing with it. (This is the source of underwear elastic that I’ve used.)

1. With the right side of the fabric facing you, line up the grove in the middle with the edge og your fabric, and zig-zag. Choose a stitch-width that lets you stay inside of the grove on right side, and the edge of the elastic on the left side.

The grove in the middle makes it easy to fold the elastic over evenly.

2. Fold the elastic over along the grove, and zig-zag through all layers (basically, in the same spot as the last seam, just through the extra layer of elastic).

3. Step back and admire. Looks nice, doesn’t it?

Regular elastic
The downside to using regular elastic is that it doesn’t lie as flat and nicely as the other methods, but there is no need to buy special elastics if you don’t feel like it! This way doesn’t add elastic to the outside edge of the underwear like the other alternatives, so I’d recommend adding a generous half-inch to the pattern where you’ll be using this technique. 1/4″ or so would be a good size.

1. With the wrong side of the fabric facing you, line up the edge of the elastic with the edge of the fabric. Zig-zag all around. Fold the elastic in, so the fabric-covered side of the elastic is facing up. Zig-zag again. You can stop here and have it look nice from the outside and ok on the inside. Or, you can fold and zig-zag again, and have the edge of the fabric completely encased and looking pretty on the inside too. Completely up to you!

Stretch lace
Using stretch lace to finish the seams is perhaps the easiest of them all, since it doesn’t require any folding!

1. With the right side of the fabric facing you, place stretch lace on top, overlapping the edge of the fabric. Zig-zag on top of the lace with a thread color that matches the lace. Depending on the width, you might need two rows of zig-zag-ing.

And that is it! I hope these posts can be helpful!

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Did you miss a post in this underwear-making adventure?

If you make a pair (or five?) from this pattern, please share! Comment, link back, and show off!

reversible biking hat – alterations

The autumn hat I shared recently is one I based on my pattern The Reversible Biking hat. I’ve made a few of them now, so knowing the pattern pretty well, I wanted to change it up a bit. And altering knitting patterns to fit your own needs really isn’t that hard! Here is what I did/what you can do:

First, I used a different yarn, which usually means a different gauge. The gauge in the original pattern is 24 stitches per 4 inches, or 6 stitches per inch. My gauge for this new yarn was around 17 per 4 inches, or 4,3 stitches per inch. How many stitches do I need to cast on to make the same size? (hmm, I sound like a math book problem!)

The circumference of the hat is 18 inches, and with 4.3 stitches to the inch of my gauge, I simply multiply the goal number of inches with the amount of stitches per inch my gauge is:

18 x 4,3 = 77,4 (≈78)
goal # of inches x your stitches pr inch = amount to cast on.

At this point, you might have to make some adjustments to your cast on number. If there is a repeat pattern, the number for your cast on has to be a multiple of that. In this case, the repeat pattern I used is 6 (p1, k5), and 78 is divisible by 6, so I’m all set. Alternatively, if you have a cuff or a brim, you can adjust the number of stitches up or down in the first round after the cuff.

Another thing I did to change the look of this hat, was to stagger the 5-row repeats and create diagonal lines instead of straight lines. This is also quite simple; at the first round of the repeated section, knit the first stitch, then do the section as normal. You’ve effectively just nudged the pattern over by one stitch, and when you keep nudging at the beginning of every repeat, you get diagonal lines!

When you tweak the number of stitches, one thing is to be aware of the stitches in each repeat. The other is to be mindful of the decreasing. The Reversible Biking Hat is pretty simple in how it decreases, so the major thing to consider here is that I have an odd number of repeats (13) instead of an even number of repeats (24) like the original has. This means that while most knit stitches in the very last row corresponds to two whole sections, there is one left over that corresponds to the last, thirtheenth section. That is ok – you can cut the tail and loop through the rest of the stitches that turns out to be 14, instead of 12.

The more intricate the pattern and the decrease design, and the longer the repeat is, the harder it is to substitue numbers. But for relative simple designs like this one, all you need is a little math!

If you have any questions, or if something was unclear, do please ask!

sewing underwear, the basics

Ready to sew some underwear from a t-shirt? Good! Need a pattern? Check out my previous underwear-sewing-post with a free pattern to download!

In this “how to” I’ll be covering the basic construction of underwear with this turquoise and brown specimen below as a sample. Next underwear-post will cover some other alternatives for adding elastic, including fold-over (FO) elastic, and the bare-bones regular kind of elastic.

You will need:

pattern for underwear
1 t-shirt
ballpoint or jersey machine sewing needle
regular elastic, or specialized underwear elastic such as fold-on elastic (I’ve had very good experience with this company).
The amount will depend on the size of the underwear, but roughly 2 yards pr piece of underwear? Continue reading →

it’s a ham

So, I made a ham – a tailors ham, that is! I’ve seen some tutorials around, but the gist of them all was more or less to cut out two layers of a ham-like shape, sew them together almost all the way around, fill with sawdust or hamster-bedding, and sew shut.

I’m reasonably satisfied. I love projects where I can use scraps, so the felted wool underside makes me very happy. However, see the wrinkles? I’m not totally happy with the shape, which I can fix for a potential next ham. It was actually really difficult (and time-consuming!) to fill this thing with wood shavings, so it’s not nearly as dense as I would like it to be.

Allow me to muse for a little bit. I don’t typically point out all the things I’m dissatisfied with in my crafting project, but this is going somewhere. I’m guilty, as I think a lot of crafters are, of looking at something handcrafted for sale and saying “I can make that myself!”. There has been some interesting discussion about just this in relation to pinterest, and the pinning of things for sale at say, etsy, with just that tagline – I can make that.

While we have the ability to craft things, and often get a lot of joy from making, aren’t we crafters just a little quick to exclaim that we can make something ourselves – instead of supporting fellow crafters and buying something they have perfected? Goodness knows that my ham is far from perfect, and the time I would spend on perfecting my pattern and technique is certainly worth something, isn’t it?

A story about Pablo Picasso and a napkin-drawing has been in my mind for a while. The story goes that a man asks Picasso to draw him something on a napkin, which Picasso does, and hands it over with a request for 6000 dollars. The man is aghast, and says “That only took you five seconds!”, to which Picasso replies “No, that took me 40 years.”

It is so easy to forget the work, preparations, and materials that goes into creating things. Even though I have the ability to make something, maybe I should support and honor the work and knowledge of crafters who have been making that something for much longer than my singular attempt. And with that, I am going to buy a beautiful, handmade tailor’s ham from this talented person, to a beautiful, handmaking, talented friend.

indigorchid

patterns, stitches, and making things