Covered in Threadmalaka’s adventure in sewing

I love hobo bags.  I’m not really sure what constitutes calling a purse a “hobo bag” because I’ve seen them in all sizes, but I always seem to like them.  I think it has something to do with the strap length.   One day I started searching around for an easy purse pattern, and I kept stumbling upon the same one: J Caroline’s Hobo Bag Tutorial.

Aimee says I’m an “offroader” because I’ll make anything, unsupervised.  She likes to have someone teach her how to make things.  I will admit, she wastes a lot less material than I do ;)  My sewing teacher told me that the definition of creativity is when you are the student AND the teacher.  Thanks, Ann!! That made me feel creative.  My mom will agree that I’m creative, but I think that creative is quite possible the furthest description of me.  Who knows, maybe times are changing?

Anyway, this hobo bag tutorial came with a printable pattern.  I printed it, taped it together, and realized it’s way bigger than I need.  Besides it called for yards of fabric, and I only had half-yards.  I cut it down and ended up with this baby.

I added a few things to it: an interior pocket, an interior zip pocket, and a snap closure.  I know, I’m wild and crazy!

I learned a ton, again.  I should have used heavier interfacing, but I had used all my super firm with the box bags.  I need to stock up on that stuff, it makes a huge difference when making bags.

I also learned that purse hardware is expensive! The magnetic snaps are $4 EACH! The rings are the same, but I stole these off an old purse. Knowing that I’m going to be making lots more of these, I went to ebay and started looking around.

I hit the jackpot. Overseas sellers pimping out wholesale purse hardware. I picked up a bunch of little tiny clasps for keyfobs inside of purses, a ton of o-rings, and 25 pairs of magnetic snaps. It was ridiculously cheap (I think around $50 for all of it, including shipping from Korea) and it got here within a week and a half.  I’m well stocked, for now.

I decided to take the plunge and make some curtains.  My house is desperate for some window coverings, but the cost of good drapery material has been prohibitive.  Feeling more confident in my ability, I went ahead and purchased fabric and took the plunge.

matchy matchying

I decided to start with the gameroom, which is now the mess that I call my studio (who doesn’t want to have their own studio?) because nobody ever goes upstairs.  If I screw these curtains up, it won’t be that big of a deal.

Because the room is practically void of decoration, I only had one chair and couch to match the curtains.  I blindly picked out material that I thought might match the crazy chair.  I figured if it didn’t match, I had 3 other bedrooms that I could make use of this material in.. but it turns out, it matched it perfectly!

This is all in preparation for making drapes for my 20 foot wall-of-windows in the downstairs living room.

I’m a little more confident that I can do it, now.  I’m keeping an eye open for the perfect material.  You can’t rush these things.  We also need a taller ladder, our 14 footer isn’t tall enough!

It’s been awhile since I’ve made these curtains, but I still haven’t got the guts to make the giant ones.  I’ll have to look into that as a winter project.

For now, back to bag making!

I never in a million years thought that I would want to quilt anything.  I never had any quilts like most people did, nobody in my family had ever been a quilter.  At least, nobody that wanted to hand them down to me.   When I was taking classes at the Stitching Studio I started to notice all the cute quilts around the shop.

first quilt top -- not finished

Then I started browsing flickr for quilts that people had made and I realized that you CAN make modern, pretty quilts.  So, I enrolled in a 6-week quilting class at the studio.  I learned SO much!  Aimee and Jackie, my mother-in-law, both took the classes with me.  We learned a ton about color matching, so our first quilts weren’t exactly right when it came to that.  Since then, I’ve done much better!

2nd quilt, not so perfect!

On top of the small lap quilt we were making in class, I decided to start another quilt on my own in unison.  This one, I went out on a limb and learned a few new techniques on my own, outside of class.  Both of these quilts are finished, I just don’t have recent pictures.  Maybe they’ll come soon.

I laugh when I look at this quilt.  Although my instructor was impressed (she called me brave!) and told me never to point out my flaws, this is my blog so I’ll point them out ;)  I really did have perfect points on this one, it came together so easily.  Then I cut the solid squares out too small (bad math) and because I had bought fat quarters, I didn’t have enough to fix it without just cutting off my points.  So there you have it, a very wonky Ohio Star quilt.  I learned a lot though, and that was the purpose!

Once the sewing room was set up adequately,  I went to Joann’s and picked up a few supplies.  Random fabrics, snaps, thread.  New scissors because we all know what happens when husbands get a hold of our good fabric scissors.. they want to use them to cut pipe, or something equally as damaging.

I started looking online for purse or bag tutorials, because I thought that would be something simple to start with.  There are soo many cute bags on etsy, but they’re way out of my skill level at this point.   I found a tutorial for a little coin/credit card/id pouch on splityarn’s blog. I made a bunch of those suckers.  I had no use for them, but they taught me some good beginner skills.  Changing the size and closure makes for good ipod/phone/misc device holder, especially when using a nice fleece for the inerior.

Right after I looked up a bunch of zipper tutorials and was about to teach myself how to do them without fear, Aimee suggested we take the “Zippers 5 Ways” class from Ann at Austin Stitching Studio.  I was in, and I took along my Mother-in-Law who recently moved to town and wants to pick sewing back up, too.  We had fun in class and learned a LOT about zippers.  Zipper fear, completely erased for $30. Ok, zipper fear mostly erased.

Zippers in hand, I went searching for some ideas online.  I found a tutorial for a box bag on dragoknit’s blog.  It took me a couple of hours to figure it out, but when I did, I emerged from the mess with this:

box bag

I ran down the street to show Aimee and she was thoroughly impressed with the use of my new knowledge.  After uploading it to flickr, a friend commented that she needed a new makeup bag.  I was wondering what I was going to do with these bags after I made them — the perfect excuse, make them for other people!

fun with box bags

Once I finished school and caught my breath, I bought a new sewing machine.   With it, I purchased an easy pajama pants pattern and set off to make my husband some “comfy” shorts.  He was excited.  He helped.

I had to rip the seams out of those shorts 15 times and by the end of it the material was so shredded that I gave up and started over again.  The second time I did it right, after only 3 tries this time.. and they even fit him.  Then he washed the shorts and go figure, I forgot to pre-shrink the material.   He now has a pair of boxer-briefs.

I told my friend Aimee that I was going to take a sewing class and she said she was also interested.  She didn’t have any prior sewing experience, though.  I found a sewing studio (Austin Stitching Studio) that looked like something I should check out.  I’m not a big fan of the sewing classes at the big fabric stores… so I wanted to stay away from that.  Turns out, the classes were perfect and I like the instructor a lot.  Aimee took the beginning series, I took the garment series.  I learned how to make pajama pants the right way.  I also learned that I hate, with a passion, sewing from patterns.

I’ve always used the excuse that I need a “sewing room” if I ever wanted to really get good at the hobby.  There’s just no way to keep a sewing space clean all the time, and it’s not productive to even think about cleaning it up and putting things away.  Most sewing projects take time, and I’m not motivated enough to get it all back out every time I want to sew.   I made the executive decision that our mostly unused gameroom upstairs would become that room.  It’s a MESS.  Everything that I need is in that room.  It’s motivating and scary and junky and I absolutely love being up there.

My mom always hated sewing.   She had a sewing machine and used it quite often to repair clothes, but I don’t think I ever saw her read from a pattern and she would complain the whole time.  I don’t blame her, though.. back in the day, sewing machines weren’t quite as user friendly as they are today.

We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so my two sisters and I had to compromise a lot.  My mom gave us the sewing machine and told us we could make clothes for our Barbie dolls if we wanted a whole wardrobe for them, like our friends had.   We did just that.  I was sewing clothes for my dolls; I couldn’t have been more than 6 years old.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t busting out a doll clothes pattern and pinning and ironing and whatnot — I would cut out the shape of a shirt and sew two sides together.  My sewing teacher recently said that sewing doll and kid clothes are easy because there’s no shape to their bodies.  I guess that was a good place to start!

Of course, letting kids play with sewing machines could be the reason for their malfunction and my mother’s poor disposition toward sewing, but it gave me a good head start on a hobby, eh? (Let’s not mention that it’s not “safe” to let little kids play with scissors and needles these days.  Things were different in the 80’s.)

When my sisters and I were “tweens” (did they call it “tween” back then, or is that a new term? I’m guessing it’s new because the word makes me cringe) my mother put us in sewing class.  We made a drawstring bag.  I remember it clearly and I still have that bag.  I also remember the instructor teaching us how to use a serger to cut & finish edges.  A 12-year old, using a serger? I’m scared of sergers and I’m 33 years old.

I got my own machine in the late 90’s and did small projects - costumes, curtains, pillows, hems, etc.  Patterns bewildered and frustrated me.  Zippers were scary.  Material started to get expensive, and I couldn’t afford to buy a bunch just to screw it up.  My Singer, although a good machine, started having tension problems and I got fed up and shoved it in the back of the closet.

In 2006 I was finishing up my bachelor’s degree in Business (15 years late, if you’re wondering) and needed an elective.  Being so sick of business-related classes that the thought of one more made me physically ill, I signed up for Intro to Textiles.   I was taking something like 19 hours in school that semester while working full time.  I wanted so badly to pull out my sewing machine but I literally didn’t have time to even re-learn how to thread it.  The class was awesome, though — it taught me the fundamentals of weaves and knits, dyes and prints, naturals and synthetics.  I loved it.  It’s the only thing I loved about school.. now I can say that I graduated from Business School and the only thing I retained was the difference between knits and wovens.

For the next 2 years I finished school and played around with other hobbies, always knowing that I wanted to start sewing again.

I hate the word “blog” but here I am, just blogging away.  In fact, I spent a considerable amount of time the last few days to creating this *cringe* blog.  Thanks to the help of my friend Andrea (www.theandrea.com), I think I’ve finally got it working.   Funny that I’m an IT girl, yet this sort of thing completely bewilders me.

I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life writing on the internet, and I’ve settled down over at livejournal.com — but I realized that my “everyday” friends and acquaintances probably don’t want to listen to me ramble on about learning to sew.

So here it is — my sewing blog.  Hopefully I’ll get over the blog issue an just find this some place to write.  I find myself coming downstairs nearly daily, looking down at myself and realizing that I’m completely covered in thread.