Functional Embellishment

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.

Stomping Grounds

So along with all the parts to repair my shiny new old straight stitch machine, I also finally got in the replacement presser foot for my embroidery machine.

This foot is designed to hover close to the fabric when the needle is down, preventing the fabric from lifting up when the needle is pulled back up through the work to draw up the bobbin thread and complete the stitch. It also has a little lever arm which the needle bar bumps against at the top of the stitch which lifts the foot up higher when the work is being moved so that the foot does not catch or drag, which would cause the work to distort.

The original foot, pictured to the left, had worn out to the point where the foot was loose enough for the needle to strike it in some positions, which is far from ideal. In fact, it was so far from ideal that the original owner sold this machine for a song claiming that the machine would jam because of it. Luckily a replacement foot wasn't hard to find.

Or so I thought.

As it turned out, the shop I ordered the replacement from didn't have it in stock and had to order it in from their supplier, and for whatever reason their supplier apparently had a dickens of a time actually sending one out. Eventually I found it in stock at another place, and they were able to deliver it nice and quick.

But, what about that other foot, the one to the right in the picture above?

Well, that's a free motion quilting foot, or darning foot. The principle of operation is largely the same, but it's built with more plastic parts and, inconveniently, part of the foot sits a bit lower to the work, leading to this awkwardness.

It makes an awful racket when that happens during stitching.

But, we've got the proper embroidery foot now, so let's compare.

That's much better.

And that's the last fix I needed to do to get this machine fully back up and running.

Embroiderizing

Not too long ago, I got myself a "broken" embroidery machine. I "fixed" it by doing little more than replacing the worn out presser foot, and ran some of the built-in patterns to test its functionality.

That left me with a pair of somewhat generic embroidery designs stitched to some pieces of raw cotton muslin. Luckily, I had a plan for what to do with them, and all it would take is a little cotton batting and some bias binding.

But before we go crazy sewing things together, we need to do a bit of layout. For this, I employed a tool that's brand new to me: frixion felt tip markers.

Basically they're felt-tipped markers (hardly surprising or unique, I know), but with the peculiar characteristic that the ink is heat-erasable. Just running an iron over the markings makes them vanish completely. As you might imagine, this can be very convenient for sewing projects.

Also convenient for sewing projects: a clear acrylic ruler.

Anyway, with this layout done, I pinned the two embroidery pieces to either side of a piece of cotton batting.

And quickly realized that I had basically stuck the pins in from the wrong side.

I didn't have to redo all the pins though, just the ones in the center.

With the sandwich assembled, it was time to quilt.

I chose the gold thread here to coordinate with the design on both the front and the back. The autumn themed side obviously had a lot of gold in it, and luckily the spring themed side also had some gold in the flowers.

The layout paid off nicely. It kind of looks slightly off center on this side, but the design itself isn't perfectly circular, so it was always going to be a compromise. The autumn side also had some asymmetries to deal with.

But now that the two sides were quilted together in the center, I could baste around the outside to secure things together.

And once more despair that things looked more off center than they actually are.

Once the excess was trimmed away, however, that asymmetry started to become less apparent.

Though it's still there if you look hard enough.

But why would you want to do that?

Anyway, through the magic of heat, the layout lines have disappeared.

And it's time to think about binding. I sewed up a test piece using the stitch-in-the-ditch method, and it turned out ok (I wasn't aiming very carefully).

But I felt like for this application it wasn't really thrilling me.

It probably would have worked out ok, but this is a small piece and 100% curved and so small imperfections would be a lot easier to notice.

I still machine stitched the first side, since doing that is incredibly easy.

Despite how crazy it looks.

I finished off the back side by hand using a blind stitch though, as it allowed me to control the placement and tension and so on of the binding very precisely.

I'm really glad that the gold colour worked out so well on both sides (just ignore the leftover frixion pen marks on the above image, I hadn't ironed that side fully when I took that photo).

And with that all done, there was only one thing left to do: enjoy a freshly toasted bearclaw and a cold brew on ice.

Delicious!

Robo-Sew

Recently I decided that while I enjoy sewing, I find the actual act of doing the sewing itself to be painfully tedious, even with the basic mechanized assistance of a sewing machine doing most of the work for me. Most is not enough. Therefore, I decided it was high time I invested in a completely automated CNC sewing experience, where I need not trouble myself with actually engaging with the hobby on a personal level at all.

So it was just my luck that I found this Brother PE800 computerized embroidery machine sitting on eBay, selling for well below its usual market value. "It's jamming, selling as-is for parts only" the description said. Well, we'll see about that.

So with that taken care of, I tried stitching a second pattern and yeah.

It really does work just fine.