It will perhaps be no surprise to hear that I'm not especially prone to flights of decorative fancy. You might wonder, then, what use I would have for something as whimsical as an embroidery machine.
Well, let me tell you.
I have a queen size bed. That means that my mattress is 60 inches wide and 80 inches long, which is dangerously close to square but still nowhere near rotationally symmetrical in practical terms.
That means that when it comes to fitted sheets, it can be quite a chore to figure out which is the long side and which is the short side.
But, no more.
I've actually been planning to do this for a while, but only got around to it today. I was inspired by one set of fitted sheets I got that had a little tag sewn into the hem in 4 places. Two of the tags said "Side" and two said "Top or Bottom" even though "End" would have been just as clear and much shorter, but whatever.
The "Top or Bottom" tags were kind of redundant but I frequently used the "Side" tags to orient myself when folding the sheets or fitting them to my mattress.
Now since a fitted sheet is, shall we say, quite large, I used a technique where you first baste the material to be sewn onto the embroidery stabilizer, rather than hooping them both together which can be a bit challenging to align.
Then it's into the machine to let it do its work.
This is a tear-away stabilizer, so once the stitching is done it just rips off where the needle perforated it.
And then the label is stitched on, in nice big letters that are exceptionally easy to find when you're half tangled in the sheet trying to orient it properly.
On both sides, of course.
The only downside is that it took me a few hours to do all four fitted sheets I own (most of that time was spent faffing about getting things aligned, basted in place, stabilizer torn away, etc. The stitching only took about 5 minutes at a time), and so now I've been staring at the word "Side" for so long that the letters have lost their meaning.
