A little something for the sewing room

 Hello, everyone.

At our sewing club meeting--I'm so glad we've begun to meet again!--we worked on a project to help organize the sewing area. It's called a stabilizer holder, and it is a storage place for all the rolls, and more rolls!, of stabilizer that are a necessary part of working with machine embroidery.

The project called for pet screening for the mesh pockets, which works fine, but I wanted something brighter. The white mesh was at my local quilting shop and it's also available at ByAnnie.com. There was some extra in the cut after the project, and I'm wondering if it would be a useful as part of a charger and cord wallet for travel. Possibly as a pouch for the charger, next to elastic to put the cords in? The design is of course still just vaporware right now. But since we now have cameras with incompatible batteries, there will be more chargers to keep track of.

The clip hanger shown here will be replaced by a dowel and some picture wire when it's hung up in the sewing room. 

 

Starting to think about Christmas

 Hello, everyone.

It's getting toward on Christmas if you're thinking about making things for people! Or making new decorations to expand what you already have.

I tried out a new embroidery pattern. (Thinking about doing it with Mylar shiny stuff but wanted to try it out just as it is first.)

This is a free-standing lace heart. It's being done in red, because Christmas, and it came out nicely. One little thing, though: if you're patching together the good parts of used pieces of wash-away stabilizer, you might not want to use those patched pieces for the free standing lace items. The patching stitching shows between the stitches.

But it's not super obvious.

My other new discovery is that stitching on the mylar stuff dulls the needle really, really fast.

The rest of the costume shiny bits

 Hello, everyone.

The remaining shiny bits for the Sailor Moon costume are in recognizable order. All that is needed is to attach an elastic to the sides of the tiara so it will stay on.

The earrings are clip on. There is some wire wrapping going on there and some jump rings, plus the found clip-on backs.

The tiara gem is a little more complex than some of the illustrations, but I think she will like it. The elastic band will attach at the loops on the sides. 

The Mylar wrapping foil behaved this time, probably because it has gold tulle over the top. I sewed the tulle on at the back to pull the foil edges around to the back instead of trying to stitch it. (Gluing the edges didn't work, they were cut too close to the size of the tiara base structure.) The stitching of the accent rows along the edges went smoothly. The main gems are glued in place, the other accents are all sewn down. The little red bobbles at the top corners are seed beads.

Working towards Halloween

 Hello, everyone.

Halloween may be a bit different this year, but the children still enjoy dressing in costumes.

DGD expressed an interest in being Sailor Moon, an anime character in a cartoon series. The character is a schoolgirl in Japan, so her outfit is based around the typical Japanese girl's school clothes. That means a sailor (middy) blouse and a pleated skirt. 

Years ago I made a costume for DD2 of this type, but it's long gone to another relative and even if it were findable, DGD isn't the same size. So I'm doing it again.

This time I started with a purchased school girl outfit. Added a pair of red knee-high athletic socks for the "boots," and sewed a gem onto each one. (She is intended to wear the knee socks with her tennis shoes.) The sock gems can be removed later for normal wear.

That was the easy part. Next began the work on the gem for the bow, the tiara (no pictures of that yet), the ribbon choker, and so on.

The bow gem in progress. As there are a number of variations of the bow gem in various drawing of Sailor Moon, I used artistic license in designing something that has multiple colors around the central red element. A ring of the round gold beads was added after the photo. 

The back side of the bow gem, showing the pin back. The beads are sewn with Fireline 6 pound test crystal colored line. Yes, I have a fishing line cutter to cut it with, the braided nylon line will ruin your regular sewing scissors.

The ribbon choker. The ends have extender chain and a spring ring and are somewhat adjustable for size.

Many of the components are from stash: Mylar type gift wrap, round gold beads, stiff interfacing and felt, faux leather and pin back, etc. The small round gems were even in stash, though I had forgotten about them.

The larger, acrylic gems were from JoAnn's. 

The tiara is still under construction, with more of the stiff interfacing and Mylar and also some gold colored tulle, and more of the acrylic gems. Like the bow gem, there will probably be a line of gold beads around the top and bottom edges of the tiara. The plan is to have a strand of elastic to hold it in place when she wears it. 

Sewing Club is Resuming

 Hello, everyone.

For the first time in a bunch of months, our sewing club is going to meet.

Our project for the meeting will be a wall-hung holder for rolls of embroidery stabilizer. (Seeing as how so many of us have embroidery machines now.) It was supposed to be a project for March, IIRC, but was put on hold when the store we met at was made to close for the duration. 

This meeting will be at our local quilt shop instead, as the other place hasn't opened its classroom space yet.

This will be the decorative panel at the top:

It has a filigree-style sewing machine, a couple of flowers at the sides, and the label STABILIZER at the bottom. (The Hoop Hangout label turned out to be almost invisible on the hoop holder, so this time I made sure to have a solid fabric for the background.)

The mint green is Kona cotton. The mesh pockets will be made of ByAnnie's white mesh and will have white binding. I'm all about increasing the amount of light available in the sewing studio!

Project from Grandma Camp

 Hello, everyone.

We have the custom of spending time with grandchildren in their summer break, for a week or two, and learning new things during that time.

This year we had another hand embroidery project: A small felt pillow.

To put it together, after cutting the heart shapes from the felt, we did something analogous to floating the fabric on the embroidery machine: A piece of scrap voile was hooped in the round embroidery hoop and the felt for embroidery was basted in place on the voile. The voile held the felt in place and under reasonable tension. It also reinforced the back side of the felt against pulling. After she finished the flower, most of the voile was cut away before completing the little cushion.

DGD was interested in learning a new stitch, satin stitch, and wanted to make a flower with a huge satin stitched center. We talked the length of the stitchs over and decided that over the satin stitch she would also learn to make lattice work to stabilize the satin stitches.

DGD is a rising third grader. She used my floor embroidery stand to hold the hoop and chose her colors to meld together rather than contrast. After stuffing the heart she overcasted the edge all around. I have hopes that she will continue to make projects with satin stitch and lattice work, developing her skills and making beautiful gifts for her family members.

DGS, some years younger, also learned a new skill: using a needle to string pony beads. He used one of the plastic needles that comes with child-level needlepoint kits, and cotton string. I wish I had known how successful this would be back when I was teaching first grade CCD! 

 

I have left the childrens' faces out of these pictures. This is in line with my philosophy that other peoples' lives are not mere raw material for my publishing. Those lives belong to the people who are living them. Attentive readers may have notice the lack of personal notes about other people in my Camino and other travel posts. This is the reason.

It's a good year for the lizards

 Hello, everyone.

 I was loading photos into the computer and doing some cropping and noticed that, since we have scads of lizards this year, we have some photos of them. And, though I hadn't noticed before, they don't all look the same.

This little guy hangs out at the palapa. He bobs his head at us.

This fellow likes the pergola. Here he's showing off his red patch next to the pot of succulents.

This little guy was under a dog water dish. It's got a sheltered spot between the outside wall and the underside of the bowl. That broad-leaved tendril near him is indeed an ivy stem. It's part of a pot of needlepoint ivy. I didn't think those could grow here but this one is doing fine.

There are also many, many young lizards around, which we haven't caught on camera. They are half the size of these when we first see them, and then they grow to be like these.