An Explanation of the Sewing Frustration

I thought I would show you just exactly what the problem was I had the other day. Scroll down for post on that.
If you remember I had said the problem turned out to be the thread coming from the spool, not the bobbin. In the picture above you can see the thread is above where it is supposed to be. See that tag that says "Pull firmly toward you"?. Well, the thread was supposed to be under that part and it was not.
In this picture the thread is in the right place. That one little thing was what gave me an hour of frustration on Saturday while I was trying to sew my skirt. Next time that happens I will know where to look. Actually, I should just make sure I have threaded the machine in the first place.

This picture is more of my working on my outfit for the wedding. Here I am trying to find all the pieces I need for the top. I only need 4 pieces. But finding them is a chore.

Have a good day!

Blue Monday in the Sewing Room

This time I am going to do Blue Monday in the Sewing room. Just like I had done with Pink Saturday.

I am using a scrap of blue fabric for the background. And there you see all my blue threads. There is my black sewing box added for contrast and composition. I store my buttons in canning jars. This one has the blue buttons. Blue ribbon, blue hem lace and bias tape. Colorful rickrack that also has blue in it. Blue tin box for sewing storage. And last, that other blue print fabric is a scrap from the outfit I made to be the mother of the groom at my son's wedding. I am wearing that outfit in my profile picture which was taken at our son's wedding in 2007.

This picture is what I promised to show you in my previous post. This is the outfit I am making to wear to my cousin's wedding we are going to this coming Saturday. And no it is not finished! Guess what I am doing every day after work this week. The print will be the jacket, which is actually very easy to make. I was amazed when I checked out the instructions. The dark fabric is a very navy blue buttersuede fabric which has some stretch on the cross grain. It was the skirt I was working on Saturday when I was getting so frustrated with my sewing machine. See previous post about that. On Sunday after church, my mother helped me to mark a hemline. I will be making the top also in the navy fabric. I hope it turns out well and that it will be comfortable too.

Thank you to Smiling Sally for hosting Blue Monday for us. Such fun to see what others do for their Blue Monday posts.

Sewing Success and Frustrations

Earlier when I was posting the teasers about my mystery project, I had some orange fabric included as part of that. My daughter asked me yesterday, "So what did you do with the orange fabric?" Well, I think I had mentioned that I accidently cut it the wrong size for my placemats. I was going to have the orange be the back side. But I couldn't since I cut wrong. That was one frustration. But I had cut into a square, unintentionally that is. And that made it the right size for .....ta da...a napkin! Yes, I made my boo boo into 2 napkins to go with my cool Halloween placemats. So all is well that ends well with this frustration. If I had not done that I was maybe going to make more cloth pumpkins. But the napkin idea worked.
Next up is my current project at the moment. But again I will not tell you right this moment. Why, you ask? Because it is part of my Blue Monday post. So you will just have to check back tomorrow for Blue Monday. Heehee. This is so fun. Teasers that is. Uh-oh, I'm going to gain a reputation as a teaser. But it is soooo fun.
So what was my other frustation? Must be more than one, since it is in the plural form in my title. Right? Right! I was working on the above yet unnamed project yesterday when the sewing machine would not cooperate. Grrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!! Can you see how frustrated I was? The bobbin thread kept messing up. I kept rechecking the bobbin area, cleaned it out, checked my manual, tried changing the needle etc etc etc. Still kept doing that irritating mess on the bobbin side of the stitching. GRRRRRRRR!!!!! Ok, now I am really getting frustrated here. GRR! My husband was beginning to sense I was getting mad at the stupid sewing machine. And on top of that, my back was really hurting. Aack! I don't know if I was sitting wrong, or if I just got so tense trying to figure this thing out. Finally, I decide to turn off the machine, unplug it and take off the side cover. As I was sweeping and blowing the dust out of that area, hoping that would help, I notice the machine was not threaded quite right. Oh Man!!! Don't tell me maybe THAT was the problem. Here I thought it was the BOBBIN that was the problem. Why did I think that? Because it was the underside of my stitching that was a mess, not the top side. Sigh.....Ok, so I close up the thingy I opened and rethreaded the machine. VOILA! That did it! Problem solved! Sheesh. I went through all that and all I had to do was rethread the machine. Next time I will remember that, instead of wasting over an hour trying to problem solve the stupid machine. No, it is not really stupid. My frustation level made me want to call it that. Man, I was ready to toss that thing out the door! It sewed like a dream after that. But first I had to take an ice cream break. Whew! Check back tomorrow for Blue Monday to see what I'm sewing now.

I Did It!!!

Yay!!! I finally finished my mystery project. Did anyone figure what I was making? The yum yum fabric I made into 2 placemats. If I want more, I will have to get more fabric. But for now this is a table for two, since there are just the two of us these days. And the witches hat fabric I made into a table runner. My husband thinks it turned out cute. I hope you think so too. Kind of strange with two different fabrics on the table, but then this is for Halloween. Who says things have to match for Halloween? Halloween is a time for weird and interesting things anyway, right?

I decided to post a couple of different views of the table. You can see some of the hats look like candy corn and the yum yum fabric has candy corn. That is why I used the two fabrics. Then the trim on the placemats has candy corn and I have that candy dish filled with candy corn.
I could add more to the table for a Halloween centerpiece. But I am plumb out of Halloween decor items. Maybe next year I will add to this tablescape, like dishes and an interesting centerpiece. But not this year. This is as far as I will go. We are taking a trip in a couple of weeks and we need to save for that trip. We are finding out Disneyland and Medieval Times are getting expensive. Plus the travel costs too. I hope you like my mystery project and found it fun to have me making you wonder what was going on. Happy Halloween!!

Another Teaser-I Am Getting There

Now that it is after midnight, I have to say I worked on this project on Sunday instead of saying today, even though it still feels like I should say today, because I have not gone to bed yet so it feels like it is still today and not tomorrow, so I need to say I did this project yesterday. But I can't because I haven't gone to bed yet.

Don't know if that makes any sense.

But here goes with the teaser again. Everyone is probably going to hate me by now. But I promise I will reveal soon what this is. I hope it is up to everyone's expectations. Or maybe you don't have any expections. That would probably be better.

I lucked out, I bought just barely enough of this ribbon to complete the trim on the yum yum fabric. You will probably be able to see that I added machine quilting to this project. Not perfect. Did not want to do lots of ripping out, but it does help to achieve the effect I wanted.

Now for the witches hat fabric. Started on the sewing in the picture above. I had to change thread colors frequently with this whole project. Hmmm...

Now you can see I have done some sewing and adding the trim. This piece does not have any batting so therefore I am not doing any machine quilting on this project. Again I just barely had enough ribbon to complete this project. I am almost done. I promise I really am! I just had to tease everyone one more time. Keep checking back to see if you are correct in guessing what I made. Heehee. Have a good week.

Another Teaser

I did a couple of things sewing related this evening. First I was ironing and found all the little bean bags I had washed and ironed them. Next step is to iron on the letter "B" since this is my second batch of bean bags for work.

After that I went to work on my mystery project and realized I had made a boo boo again. Darn! The orange fabric was cut too small for my project. I guess that is what happens when you are not following a pattern. Fortunately I had enough of the yum yum fabric to continue with my project. Here you can see the wrong side and that I am including some batting. Have you guessed yet what I am making? And that my friends is where I will leave you for now. Heehee. I feel good for having gotten more done on it before I got too tired, which is what I am right now. It is late and I need to get to sleep. Gotta work tomorrow and we are going out of town to visit friends. We will be staying over and going to a Pumpkin Festival with our friends. And yes I will take my camera. Ta ta for now.

My Saturday

Earlier this year I bought this fabric when I was looking for fabric for a dress to attend a wedding in May. There was not enough of this one for a dress left on the bolt. So I bought what was left to decide later what I wanted to make with it. I have since decided to make a light weight jacket with it. The pattern is sort of a swishy type style. Yesterday I took a scrap with me to find fabric for a top and skirt to go with it. I found a Buttersuede in a dark blue that should work. This fabric looks very nice next to it. However, it goes on sale today. So I will go to the fabric store after church today to get that fabric.

Here is another teaser on my Halloween project. Obviously I am not getting this done as quickly as I hoped. But it is getting there. Here I am measuring where I want to cut it. Kind of hard to take a picture with one hand while doing something with the other. Husband was not home to help me out here. See my home blog for the info on that part of my Saturday.
Here I make the first cut.
Then my second cut. I did a couple more after that one to get it to the size I want it to be.
Then I do the same with the orange fabric.
And again with the witches hat fabric.
Here is my pile of cut fabric along with the baby hat I cut out that goes with that baby boy outfit I am still working on as a gift. That baby was born the week of Sept. 21st I think. This outfit will not fit him until next spring probably.

That is what I accomplised today. I feel like I move much slower these days and don't get as much done in a day as I used too. Oh well. I was wiped out from working 8 hours on Friday which I don't normally do. Even though it would mean more money to work 8 hours a day, it just wipes me out to do that.

Maybe after we get home from church I will have energy to tackle more sewing. I need to, I got things to finish.

Pink Saturday #5

You will find my Pink Saturday post on my home blog. Come visit it here. Happy Pink Saturday!

Sewing/Crafting Projects

I had mentioned earlier about getting Poly-pellets to use in place of the beans in the bean bags from work. I wanted an easier way to keep the bean bags clean when we needed to disinfect/wash them. First thing I did was to just cut open the ends and dump out the beans. It was easier to just cut them rather than rip out the stitching. Then I washed the bags in a load of whites which I do in warm water with bleach added. Then I had to press them.

I had wanted to add iron-on numbers, but we could not find any numbers. But we did find letters. That will work. I will do a group of A's, a group of B"s and so on. This will help us to track which bags have been washed or need to be washed.
So here they are with the A's added on. I had to get 3 packages to have enough of each letter for this project. Then it was time to restuff with the poly-pellets and hand sew them closed. Today I did the maching sewing part to secure the handstitching. Don't want those bags busting open as we do the toss games with them. I realized one thing while machine stitching the ends. I need to make the bags less full. Sometimes it was a tight squeeze trying to stitch the ends. I used the zipper foot, but even that was hard at times.
Here are 10 "A" bags ready to go back to work and I will bring home another 10 for a batch of "B" bags. Now, just so you know I have not forgotten the surprise Halloween project. First I had to wash and dry the fabric to preshrink it. I did not want the chance of the fabric shrinking after I sew the project. It might cause the ribbon to pucker!
Ironing the Yum Yum fabric!
Ironing the orange fabric.
And finally ironing the witch hat fabric. That is where I will leave you for now and keep you still wondering what in the world I am doing with this Halloween fabric. Heehee.

Pink Saturday #4

Obviously I have not posted here since last Saturday's Pink Saturday. But you can go to my home blog for this week's Pink Saturday post. Thanks.

Click here to visit my home blog.