My Sunday

I had some work-work to do in the morning, and this is mostly what my afternoon consisted of: hemming the Sergeant's pants. I'm still pretty slow and methodical when it comes to sewing, but I managed to get them done (three pairs). And they're mostly cheap jeans from Costco, so the stakes aren't very high.

One of the needle threads on the serger kept breaking and I couldn't figure out why. I'll have to fiddle around with it, maybe replace the needle. But it works fine with three threads instead of four, so I just kept going.

Then we went to showing of "The African Queen," which is such a classic, lovely movie. They played a clip of Katharine Hepburn on the Dick Cavett show beforehand that was delightful. You should watch it.

The Sergeant, surprisingly, had not seen the movie before. He enjoyed it.

Then we came home and had Buttery Breakfast Casserole for dinner that I had assembled yesterday. Plus salad. The casserole is very tasty and rich, and would be good for a brunch gathering.

The Wimminfolk and Their Needlework

The Sergeant had a birthday party Sunday that involved an engine swap, loud music, a lot of grease and broken tools. Meanwhile the gals came prepared to knit or stitch, mainly because the topic of sashiko came up in a Facebook discussion beforehand. Turns out Amanda had recently bought sashiko supplies, as had I, and Mona was curious about the technique.

Not pictured is Jenny, who brought along something to learn how to darn on, but which turned out to be not very darnable — a backpack that a squirrel had gnawed holes in. I did a little sewing to close up the holes, but really, it needed a patch. So I patched it:

I had this little square of fabric that matched nicely, and it sure looks better than the duct tape Jenny was going to use. I put some of that Cloud Cover fusible on the inside to protect the stitching from snags.

Meanwhile, Mona was playing around with the sashiko needles and thread on a piece of batik from my stash. (I have so much batik quilting cotton, it's a little embarrassing.) She sent me this photo later.

I like the idea of stitching to outline some of the patterns on the fabric. I need to play around with that on the jeans-patching I plan to do. Possibly as soon as today (we have a new little sewing club at work that meets at lunchtime on Fridays).

Amanda was the stitching star of the party. Turns out we'd both ordered the same sashiko book and needles from Amazon, but Amanda had also ordered indigo linen from fabric.com and marked up grids to practice stitching patterns from the book.

Meanwhile, I'm still reading the introductory chapter. But I'll get to the actual stitching one of these days!

According to Amanda, who was kind enough to send me photos after the fact, the pattern in progress on the left, above, is called Yabane, or "arrow feather," on Page 75 of the sashiko book. The one on the right is called Dan Tsunagi or "linked steps" (Page 99). The one on top is an attempt at Kagome or "woven bamboo" (Page 100).

These little squares could become coasters or bags or even denim patches. I'm tempted to order some linen myself, but I've got an upcoming trip to the Bay Area that might include a trip to Japantown. So I'm restraining myself until then. I have plenty of other projects I can play with in the meantime.

Darned Denim

I posted a while back about my ripped jeans. I was contemplating putting a patch of some kind on them and doing sashiko stitching over the patch.

But then I learned about darning. And it happened that I'd ordered dark indigo sashiko thread that matched my jeans almost exactly.

The lighting on these photos makes the denim look a lot lighter than it really is. I wore these jeans today and you could not see the repair unless it was pointed out. I had a solution for the inside of the repair, as well.

A friend suggested using Pellon Cloud Cover, a fusible product designed to cover up embroidery stitching on baby items. It's called a stabilizer, but is pretty flimsy and filmy for that. I ordered a roll from Amazon.


It fused quite nicely to the denim, helping secure and protect the stitches, and keeping the knots from being irritating.

We'll see how it holds up in the wash!

One of these days I'll sit down and write a darning tutorial. It really is a useful skill.

Little Zipper Bag

As I mentioned yesterday, I thought I'd take my sashiko stitching samples and make a little zipper bag out of them.

It turned out kind of cute! I'm not thrilled about the zipper color (it's more of a turquoise), but I can always make more.

Should I give it away?

Pressed for Space

My cute little sewing nook is upstairs. My unwieldy monster of an ironing board lives downstairs in the laundry room. If I need to press a seam open or fuse some interfacing, as one does when sewing, I don't want to have to run up and down the stairs all the time, nor leave the iron unattended. Nor am I going to haul that ironing board up and down the stairs.

Happily, there are tools designed for such problems.

Here we have some 5-inch pre-cut fabric squares to which I would like to apply some fusible fleece.

And here we have the June Tailor Quilter's Cut 'n' Press, which has a small cutting mat on one side and a pressing surface on the other. It's a baby ironing board! (I don't know nothin' about ironing no babies, so hush; you know what I mean.)

Now we just need some steam. The Steamfast travel and crafting iron should be just the ticket. Let's take it for a spin.

Yep, works great! It gets quite hot, and produces audible and visible steam. That fusible is well-fused.

I crawled into bed with some more crochet cotton and a loooooong sashiko needle. This was the result. I think I'm going to make a little zipper bag out of it. That seems to be my default. Everyone likes a little zipper bag, right?

Darning and Sashiko Denim Repair

I've been researching Japanese boro and sashiko sewing techniques as an option for repairing my holey jeans. Sashiko is an attractive embroidery technique that's not super-complicated, and it might make the jeans looks trendy rather than just ... patched.

(By the way, it's not pronounced sah-SHEE-ko, as I thought, but SOSH-ko ... the "i" is almost silent.)

I also ran across a darning tutorial on imgur, so I thought I'd experiment with that, too.

Once upon a time, darning was a skill most women learned as children, and many men, too. I always thought it entailed just sewing a hole shut, or sewing over it. But it's actually weaving.

I cut a swatch from an old pair of jeans to practice on. The first hole I cut was too big, so I cut a second, smaller one and tried darning it with denim thread. Hmm, that didn't work very well. The thread was too fine. So I stopped halfway through.

I cut another small hole and used No. 8 crochet cotton with a sashiko needle (which is longer and sturdier than a regular embroidery needle, with a bigger eye).

That actually turned out pretty well! That will be a good option for fixing small rips in denim or other things.

For larger holes, especially if the fabric around them is weak because of wear, patching with sashiko stitching is an interesting effect. If you have to patch, you might as well do it stylishly, right?


I like the way that turned out, too. I folded the patch fabric so there were no raw edges, and whipstitched around the outside. I started to do the lines of sashiko stitching freehand, then realized I'd better mark the fabric with chalk. Next time I will try to map out my edge stitches, too.

It was interesting figuring out how to hold the needle and use the thimble. (This video, while not the best quality, shows how to hold maneuver the needle. Skip to 3:17.)

In the end, I also had to get some pliers to pull the needle through the mulitple layers of denim and quilting cotton. That's probably not standard.

A friend told me about an iron-on stabilizer called Cloud Cover that is designed to cover the rough stitches on the inside of an embroidered garment, so I ordered some. Soon I'll have those pants repaired!

I have this variety pack of blue batik-y fabric that should be suitable for all kinds of projects using sashiko stitching and boro techniques. I did a Google image search for "Boro" and have been exploring all the pages that come up. It's also fun to try using the Japanese characters for sashiko (刺し子) and boro (ぼろ) and explore that way. But I find that Google Translate really struggles with those pages, so I don't get as much out of them as I would like.

The Sergeant and I are hoping to go to Tokyo for a week or so just to explore. He went there for work last year and really liked it. I was jealous!

Serging to the Rescue

I got this Cloudborn Fibers bag as a promotional freebie. (Bet your didn't know that I made a whole sweater out of Cloudborn yarn a year ago ... because I wasn't blogging then. But there it is at right: Laura Nelkin's Novus pattern, in Cloudborn bulky merino. It's an interesting construction that I enjoyed knitting.)

Anyhoo, this bag is a perfectly nice knitting project bag, except for one thing: It's made out of burlap, which is fine if you treat it correctly. But if you don't bother finishing the seams, they will fray into oblivion very quickly. The side seam on this bag had already popped open, and the drawstring channel was about to do the same.

I bought a pretty bag from Fringe Supply Co. that did exactly the same thing. It fell apart so completely that I had to throw it out. I didn't know how to fix it.

This time, though, I have a means of stopping the fraying in its tracks: my new (to me) serger. I'm still learning its ins and outs, and it's still pretty intimidating, but what better way to practice than on something you would otherwise toss?

If you're not familiar with sergers (a.k.a. overlockers), they trim the edge of the fabric and use three or four threads to encase the edge of a seam. You see such a finish in ready-to-wear all the time. I got this serger from my mother-in-law for my birthday; it's one of her older ones that is a great little workhorse. She gave me some instruction on it when she was here over Christmas. Here's a slo-mo video of it in action:

You can easily see the blade cutting, and the two needles coming down and up. The loopers are a little harder to spot, poking out to loop the thread around the edge of the fabric. I ran the serger down both sides of the bag, then zigzag-stitched the bottom of the drawstring channel on my regular sewing machine to stabilize the fraying threads there.

The bag now has much tidier seams that won't fray, and the drawstring channel will stay intact.

(Those are the tweezer-style thread snips I bought at the Stock Show last week, by the way. They are so sharp! And super-easy and comfortable to use. I love them.)

Ordinarily the serger threads would be all the same color (light or dark), but my MIL was showing me how to change threads, so we have a mixture here. I successfully switched them all to dark threads as you can see in the video above. Yay! It's kind of a nerve-wracking process.

And now I like this bag again. It won't fall apart on me anytime soon.

Patching Denim With Shashiko Embroidery

Not long after I got these nice French Dressing jeans, I fell on concrete and tore a hole in the knee. Dammit! Since then, they've been hanging in my closet, taunting me. They fit well, they look nice, and I really need to patch them in some way.

But how best to do that? I could put a patch on top of the hole or underneath, and try to machine- or hand-stitch for an unobtrusive fix, but I suspect it would just look ... clumsy.

Recently, though, I learned about Japanese boro textiles and shashiko embroidery. Hmmm. Why not go bold?

There's a good introductory article on Design Sponge. I'm thinking I should probably get a little piece of denim and some patching fabric to practice with. Not to mention shashiko needles and thread.

Because and important part of learning a new craft is getting all the right tools and gear. Right?

I'll let you know how it goes!

Down the Rabbit Hole

I spend far too much time thinking and reading and researching about crafts, and not nearly enough time actually doing them.

I don't think I'm alone, if Pinterest is anything to go by. Do you look at Pinterest? I've not spent a lot of time there because it feels like Too Much Stuff and I just get overwhelmed.

Ravelry (which is a knitting resource) is also a little overwhelming, but I use it to organize my outlandish yarn stash. Here's a portion of my stash, sorted by color:




I also like to look at patterns there, and think about what I'll knit next. Rather than finishing the projects I've already started. So many beautiful or interesting things!

I look at the patterns, then I look at how they turned out when knitted by different people with different yarns. Hours pass.

I wish Ravelry also had a means of cataloging my fabric stash, so everything could be in one place. Despite not being a longtime sewer, I have managed to amass a large amount of fabric, mostly quilting cotton. I should probably learn how to quilt, eh?

Maybe I'll investigate quilting once I'm done exploring shashiko embroidery and boro fabric-repair techniques. Which is what this post was originally going to be about, but I got distracted.

Lesson Learned: Busy Fabrics Don't Need Fancy Quilting

I did some straight-line quilting on bags I made a couple of weeks ago (I gave them away before it occurred to me I should take pictures of them). I thought I would try it again on a bag I made yesterday, but with a diamond pattern to trace the design.



It was good practice, but as I discovered, quilting isn't very visible on a busy fabric like this. It's nice for adding a little structure, but simple straight lines would have been sufficient.

Once I sewed and pressed the bag, you couldn't really see any quilting at all. But it turned out nicely, nevertheless.

I only recently discovered that "quilting" is just one part of making a quilt, and refers to the stitching (plain or fancy) you do all over the top of the quilt to secure all the layers together. The other part of quilt making is "piecing," or the process of sewing together the many pieces of fabric that make up the top of the quilt.