Best tool ever?

For quite some time I have been gushing about how much I love my rotary cutter and mat, they are “the best tool ever” but I have changed my mind. The best tool ever is not something picked up in the store, ordered from Amazon or anything of the like.  For ME the best tool ever (for sewing) has been YouTube.

Yup YouTube.  I am not sure if the loving husband and I are just not good at understanding written instructions for sewing or what but seeing someone else do whatever we are trying to do really really helps.  We can find five or more ways to do something with a few clicks of the keyboard.  We can replay the same video over and over until we get every step right.  Heck we can even find videos of folks with the same machine we have doing something.

Sure some videos are down right horrible but kudos for folks at least trying to help or explain things.  Some are still well beyond our level of understanding but most turn out to be great.  I have lost hours and hours falling down the YouTube rabbit hole as I click from one video to the next.  Usually ending up nowhere related to what I was originally looking for.  But I have to credit a number of my projects to ideas I picked up on YouTube.  Often the project is modified or not at all the same but the seed is planted and I am off to plan my project.

Sorry rotary cutter, you are still hold my heart as I hold you up and belt out “I have the POWER!” once in a while but the best tool, for me, is YouTube.

What tool does it for you?

More useful “stuff”

Over the summer I noticed how many paper napkins we were using and found it disturbing and wasteful so in late August I decided I was going to try a new idea.  Home made cloth napkins. These would be easy to make, help me work on my sewing skills and be festive all while making less trash.

Turns out they are indeed pretty darn easy to make, a good bit of pressing to get the mitered corners done neatly but they are worth it. They hold up well in the regular wash and feel so much better on the skin than paper. I love decorating for various holidays and seasons to this was a neat way to do it and of course reason to raid the fabric store for lots of quirky prints. I have made so many of them that others have noticed and inquired about me making a set for them.  Sure I can do that…humm maybe I can get good enough to bring in a few bucks to support my fabric habit.

Each set I make has between 8 and 12 napkins depending if it’s for our formal dinning room or the breakfast nook.  That way there are always extras when some are in the wash. The only real problem is where to store them all.

A small sample of a few of the napkins

The best part is we have not purchased anymore paper napkins! All in all I am rather proud of myself with how well they turned out.

Sewing useful stuff to hold “stuff”

Dance shoe bag

Test bag making turned into a wonderful dog booties bag.

Ideas for sewing projects jump out at us from the most unusual places, this time dance class. We found one of our dance instructors had a rather tired bag for his dance shoes and after chatting with him about what he liked about his bag we decided to surprise him with a new one.

As is typical with us the idea was easier than the actual project but after a few misfires and an embarrassing size problem (way too small) we gave him a new shoe bag tonight. The final outcome is shown in blue above and we think he loved it. Hopefully it will last for years to come.

The smaller St. Patrick’s bag was one of our trial runs with scraps we had in our neat little pile. It’s just the right size to store a set of our dog’s winter booties. Score! Isn’t it just the cutest little bag?

We did realize our sewing machine does not like sewing four layers of thick fabric together. Not sure if it’s a machine setting we just have not found yet, loving husband is investigating this, or if our machine is just made for smaller jobs. It was fun and educational but not a project I would rush to do again.

Fabric storage?

Our fabric pile is starting to look a bit more like Mt. Fabric than a pile.  How to store, sort and organize this bit of mayhem is starting to simmer in my brain.  We don’t have a dedicated space for sewing and while I guess I could put the fabric in plastic bins in our “office” (read junk room that we all seem to have under various names) but then its not even on the same floor as the sewing machine or where we work on things.  Not to mention it’s got its own troubles in need of cleaning up. Our formal dinning room moonlights as the sewing room and honestly does a darn fine job of it. Great afternoon light, table is perfect height, super comfy chairs, big space for laying out projects that don’t get in the way of other stuff.  Great space but not THE full time space.

When I want to use the room for it’s intended job then all the “stuff” must go somewhere.  The big pile of fabric just adds to the feeling of chaos regardless of if the room is sewing or dinning.   I don’t want a big bin stacked in the corner but I fear that’s the only option I can come up with.

Maybe the New Year will bring a rush of reorganizing the pantry and we can make room in there.  *Note the loving husband will not like this idea one little bit*

How do others deal with organizing all their sewing stuff when they have no dedicated space or the space must be temporary?

Starting out small

So right after the first of the year I tell my love one morning “If we have this new gadget we gotta go get the STUFF that goes with it!” Yup I get a blank stare from the other pillow.”Stuff?”

“Yup, stuff as in bobbins, thread, seam rippers etc. STUFF”

“OK but let’s not go crazy or take too long”

Mwwhaahaaaaaaa!  We got STUFF, lots of stuff and then had to find a container to put it all in, turns out this was the hard part.  You see I am not a girly girl, and the notions boxes in the store were way to frilly or dowdy for us.  We did not need huge, or pink or quilted or having a billion little cubbyholes…so what do we do?  We found something that looks kinda like a tackle box, its grey with a couple of simple snap closed smaller containers. 

We picked up scrap fabric to try things on, a couple of spools of thread along with various odds and ends.  It was like a party taking everything out and playing with it before stuffing it in our sewing tackle box. We were setting up for turning on the machine for the first time, getting all excited.

Being the organized intelligent adults we agreed I would set the machine up while he read off instructions etc. We also watched a couple of YouTube vids (wasting many hours going in the process) to get us going. 

Let me tell you right now there are a hundred and one places to catch your fingers or jab yourself with a sewing machine.  I am quite sure these things are used at Gitmo to scare the incarcerated. Sharp needles are just the start of the ways to cause harm and by I’m starting to think the most benign.

Set up seems to go well so we start trying to sew simple lines, testing out all the crazy stitch patterns the machine comes with.  BTW are 90% of these stitches ever used? We start to notice a problem with the bottom side of our stitches but it comes and goes, we figure we will learn control, no biggie right?  HA!

One of the first projects my love gave me was mending the seam on our dog’s bed.  OK looked pretty easy, nothing fancy so I am sure I can do this.  Heck we even bought heavy weight thread for the dog bed.  Started off all well and good but went less than an inch and the most horrible crunching snapping sound came from the area the needle was.

“Should we be wearing eye protection?”

“No, why?”

“Sounds like we are going to, or already have, broken a needle and that scares me”

Investigation revealed the our project was stuck to the machine, would not budge without a lot of pulling and cursing.  A whole wad of thread was jumbled up on the bottom even though the top stitching looked fine.  This happened several times, we played with the tension, the type of needle, the speed-you name it we tried it.  No luck, go an inch or two and BLAM back to wad o mess.  After much hunting around on YouTube and the manual it seems someone did not read out a very important warning when I was setting up the machine.  Seems in order or the tension to be set right the foot must be raised on the machine. 

Really???  THAT is what caused all this mess, wads of useless thread and angst for every member of the household?  Yup seems my bright idea to leave the foot down to protect me from catching my finger on the needle was the problem all along.Well past midnight but the dog got her bed back, we had our very chewed up pride taped back together and we called it a night.

Starting out small indeed