Old sewing machines with worn out feet have a nasty habit of sliding around the table and scratching it. For this reason I strolled into our local hardware shop a couple of years ago and said I wanted rubber feet for sewing machines. The assistant hesitated all of two and a half seconds and said "You need seat stoppers." "What?" I asked, following him as he beetled around the corner inside the shop. I didn't have a clue what he was talking about, and had strange images of moving armchairs in my head. Then he thrust a little packet of four rubber feet at me, and the penny dropped. Evidently I don't spend enough time gazing at the underneath of a toilet seat to have thought of the solution earlier. The feet came with their own screws, but I had to buy some tiny washers to go inside. If you slide the machine a fraction sideways the feet come off their screws if there isn't a washer in place to prevent it. And then you end up with a scratch bigger than the one you were trying to avoid. Hello Ellie - thank you for following!
About a year ago I did my first ever doll quilt swap on an internet quilting forum. I no longer had any excuses to fudge my corners, which up until then had been messy. I just wish I had discovered hair grips earlier. Some people like to fold over a double thickness strip instead of doing a single thickness strip as I show on the video. I have always been a bit wary of ending up with too much bulk, which is why I have always stuck to my method. Either way, the method of folding at the corners to get the mitre is the same. As for the doll quilts... yes I will show you the quilts I made and received. You can expect a little miniature quilt show, starting in the autumn!
The purple is now trimmed approximately an eighth of an inch from the stitching and the edge finished with blanket stitch. It is best to trim a little at a time to reduce the risk of fraying. For the blanket stitch I have been using four strands of stranded embroidery cotton. With the blanket stitch you can either use a contrasting colour for decorative effect, as I have here, or a colour to blend in with the appliqué shape. So there it is - easy! If anyone gives this method a try, please let me know how you get on!
Once all the machine stitching is finished, tear all the paper away. The paper is surprisingly strong, so put your finger over the stitching as you tear the paper to prevent it pulling the stitches. It's good fun taking away the paper from outside the design first, so the design shows up with the paper that is left. It's nice to see the whole thing taking shape. Third and last stage tomorrow!
First you need to prepare a stencil of your design. I use ordinary greaseproof paper as tracing paper to trace the design. Next, using the sewing machine, transfer the design onto a stencil. I use brown greaseproof paper for the stencil. Put a thick needle in the machine, an old blunt one is ideal. Put the tracing on top of the stencil paper and follow the line of the tracing so that the design appears as a line of perforations on the stencil. The reason I don't use the actual tracing as the stencil is that I don't want to risk transferring traces of pencil onto my work. The top picture shows the stencil with the dates that appear at the bottom of the wall hanging that I lent to the pub for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee party. It is pinned into position on top of the purple, which is laid over the cream background. Then it is time to machine sew through all three layers. Stage 2 coming tomorrow... NB Note for our transatlantic friends. For some strange reason you know greaseproof paper as parchment.
Old appliqué quilts always look so beautiful, especially the ones lovingly stitched by hand. Anyone who sits down to do endless hours of needleturn has my boundless admiration. Off and on over the years I have scoured books looking for a method of appliqué that wouldn't take me several decades to complete, and which wouldn't end up looking modern. Any method that involved spray-on starch, iron-on backing or zigzag were automatically out as being contrary to my vintage principles. What I wanted was a reasonably quick and easy method using straight stitch machines, where I could do fairly complex shapes and not have the horror of turning under tiny weeny hems. I never found a book that gave me the answer. Eventually I thought up my own method. I won't claim that it is original, because the result at times looks so 1930s I can't believe that sooner or later I won't find an old book or magazine that shows how to do it. So here is the result. The photo shows the top part of the Diamond Jubilee wall hanging. Over the next few posts I will show how it was done... Hello to Jessica Bohannon! - Jessica has her grandmother's treadle, a Singer 66 redeye treadle. Go to her blog and admire it!
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