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One step forward....

With the prep for this project I took some old fabric and reinforced it with fusible interfacing and cut them into roughly business card sizes. These little things I have been using for stitch samples.

They will not be 100% professional looking as they are partially about getting to know the machine's quirks for each stitch.

Largely the machines have been stitched with a length of between 1 and 2, and a width of 4, except for the straight stitch, which by its own nature has no width. And these machines are not yet advanced enough to have straight stitching offsets.

There have been some casualties as I have worked on making these little stitch cards. The biggest being just the cards themselves. I have a particular loathing for rotary cutting. It is extremely useful for a straight line, but cutting hundreds of rectangles is just something I don't much care for doing. I have made TWO whole quilts in my life, and I only had to cut pieces for one of them... never again if I can avoid it.


These little rectangles start off at 1.75 by 3.325 inch cards, slightly smaller than a typical business card. I got the idea for this from this blog. I found the idea most appealing as I'm working with a machine that I don't know if everything I have will work well for it. I don't know what pattern cams will work, and what one's won't. More over, I don't want to have to redo an ENTIRE page of a stitch book just because it missed a stitch or because the tension was wrong for a single pattern.

This was a great choice by the way. As of this moment, I have stitched samples for both Helen (16010) and Jane (16011), and have had all sorts of adventures getting the tension right, and getting the stitch right looking. Please see the pending blogs on both Helen and Jane for the details.I have made some mistakes. Both in cutting them, and in sewing through them. I attempted to ease my distaste of rotary cutting by getting a rotary cutting craft cutter. The kind that is supposed to go through foam and cardstock with no issues. That took a learning curve. But in the end most of the pieces looked alright. My guess is if my interfacing wasn't so squishy and was more stiff it would have worked better. Lessons learned, right?

 


All in all hundreds of little pieces of fabric later, I'm sewing and making!

I really do recommend this style of stitch book though. It has been marvelous. When I sell my machines I'm going to include full stitch books. And if someone just doesn't like the look of a particular stitch, they can easily redo the piece and change it out in the book. That's pretty cool.


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