First I want to welcome new followers to the blog who found me though the Grow Your Blog Party from last week! It has been a pleasure reading your comments and finding more new blog friends with similar interests. I really can feel the "web-ness" of the WWW when we do things like the blog party, which connects people from all over through a desire to share all the fun things we do.
Then, last week was a week of a lot of sewing! The week before I finally bought myself a Baby Lock Eclipse serger (after thinking about one for at least 6 months)...
I had one serger lesson before I took LisAnn's Serger Club Tiered Skirt class at Country Sew and now I can very quickly and easily make skirts...
What I love about the serger (also called an overlock machine) is that it does several things at the same time in the sewing process. It is essentially a finishing machine (all those weird stitches you see at the edges of your clothing seams, those are overlocked -- keeps fabric from fraying), but it also can gather and of course it cuts the edges of your stitches so instead of 5 or 6 steps with a regular sewing machine to make gathers (pin, baste, gather, stitch, take out basting, trim seams), it does all that in one step. In the class we learned how to make the casing for elastic (like a blind hem for you sewers out there), how to figure out the fabric for the tiers, and for the hem, a nice rolled hem stitch.
And then yesterday, I went to Oakland for an all day workshop at the lovely A Verb For Keeping Warm yarn and fabric shop. The workshop was to learn the basics of the Alabama Chanin hand-sewn method of stenciling, stitching, and cutting a garment. We made a simple bandana sampler as a beginner project.
Here is a section of three ways of stitching around the cut or stenciled areas...
All of Alabama Chanin clothing is made on jersey knit (think t-shirt material). I had never actually worked with jersey before so I discovered how difficult it is to cut when I was making the squares to bring to the workshop. I guess it takes a little getting used to. And lest you think oh, t-shirt material, how plain can that be, check out her collection. Keep in mind these are all hand-sewn and take weeks to make... and cost thousands of dollars if you want the full embroidered beaded clothing!
