more sewing

 

More news on the sewing machine front: the machine comes with a dustcover, but sewing sites all over the internet suggest that one of the first projects for us noobs is a new cover, probably because it means sewing in straight lines. I decided to make one with pieces from all the remnants I was cutting up for my first projects. Above, you can see three of the five panels that make it up.

That gold piece in the left foreground, on the short side, was a penance: it's a fabric called taffeta, which is a bargain-basement satin replacement. It's thin, slippery, and fussy to work with. You probably have some in the linings of your coats and blazers. The other guys were all plain cotton weave, and much better-behaved.

I put some bias tape around the hold for the handle, and as a finish at the bottom because I hadn't left enough seam allowance at the bottom to finish it properly, but it looks pretty good anyway.

The other side:

The machine comes with a foot pedal controller, and there wasn't any good place to keep it, so an earlier project was to make a bag for the pedal. The key was to make the bag handles of a length that the bag would hang from the sewing machine handle, so I could pick up and carry the whole business. 

The blue of the pedal bag and the panel that faces it aren't the same, but they're close. I didn't plan it that way. The weight of the pedal bag keeps the handle upright; otherwise, the sewing machine handle falls into a channel molded into the machine body for it.

I've made a number of face masks, but my new project is these do-rags:

There's a surprising amount of fussy sewing that goes into them, including two darts, and complicated curves where each side piece meets the top. Those last are curves that are cut so they don't match, and their layout is similar to the way a sleeve fits into a shirt shoulder. The do-rags take little fabric to make, so I expect to have a number of 'em. I've adjusted the pattern: The Excellent Wife (TEW) has a head that's much smaller than mine (mine, after all, needs room for all the bad ideas), and I can make the items to fit. 

I've been fooling around with knit fabric preparatory to working on bike jerseys, and knit fabric poses its own difficulties (like, it stretches ALL THE TIME: when you measure it, when you mark it, when you cut it, when you sew it up...). And I also need to learn to cut fabric so it doesn't look like I used my teeth.

But I DID repair a pair of TEW's jeans yesterday, and I've altered a couple of my t-shirts to be a bit more form-fitting...

Maybe a bow-tie pattern?