Puget Sound Sewing & Craft

Upcoming Sewing Classes at Quality Sewing Centers

FREE July Sew Fun Coupon - Download free_july_sew_fun_coupon.pdf
Don't miss this month's Sew Fun Presentation at Quality Sewing Centers. Summer is here! Bring the sunshine into your home by redecorating with machine embroidered projects. Jazz up any room by adding spots of color with beautiful fabric choices, fabulous projects and wonderful embroideries. Or use these fun embroideries and embellishment techniques to make your ready-to-wear garments truly yours. The techniques this month feature machine trapunto, mitering points, faux chenille, embroidery and lots more. No matter your taste, there’s something for everyone. Each Sew Fun Presentation is a lecture-demo class full of samples, inspiration, helpful tips and tools. No sign up is required, come as you are. Sew Fun dates, times and locations.

At July Sew Fun, one of the featured embroidery design packs is Anita Goodesign's fabulous botanical embroidery designs, Fritillaria, from original artwork by Renée Bolmeijer. Renée's primary passion, honed from designing many lines of hand-painted accessories and furniture, has grown into painting decorative images in a wide range of subject matter. With a background in the ever-changing world of home fashion decor, she enjoys experimenting with faux finishes, paint techniques and paper arts. She strives to paint in a style that suits current trends and fashions, and is always researching new ideas to stay ahead of the curve. Her paintings are very detailed, with a sense of movement, fun, and whimsy, that offers new approaches to traditional themes. A great source of inspiration for her are frequent visits to art museums, galleries and flea markets, and travels to Europe to her family's Victorian Castle in Ireland. Renée Bolmeijer grew up in Holland, Germany and Belgium and has been fortunate to travel all over the world, particularly in Europe, the US, and Asia. These travels have been instrumental in forming her interest and passion for decorative art and painting. Renée works out of her home-based studio in Charlotte, NC.

July Jenny Haskins Special Event with Debbie Homer at multiple Quality Sewing Locations

If you have ever seen a Jenny Haskins Masterpiece you have probably wondered how did she do it. Jenny will tell you quickly believe you can and you can! There is no doubt her work is beautiful and her creativity is amazing even to the most advanced, but her techniques are extremely simple. See how easy it is to create beautiful treasures using Jenny’s specially digitized designs. You will also learn to construct a perfect quilt block with a few simple clicks of a mouse. You will never again feel intimidated when you look at beautiful creations. Come see for yourself, it will be one of the most fascinating classes you have ever taken. Come join Debbie Homer to learn the secrets of beautiful embroidery Jenny Haskins style. Our special guest Debbie is National Training manager for Jenny Haskins products and a Jenny Haskins certified instructor. You can view dates, times, locations and sign up for this class online.

I hope everyone is having a good July! Hopefully these classes will help inspire your creativity - I know I need all the inspiration that I can get during the summer months to sew and be crafty.

-Carmen
carmen@qualitysewing.com

Soft, Squishy Love: on crocheting amigurumi.

I fought it for a while – I already make felt animals and have sewn some really cute dolls, not to mention all of the other zillion crafty pursuits I dabble in. But I just keep seeing these books with charming titles like “Mr Funky Crochet Wonderful,” and seeing the enchanting critters that Roxxy from the 4th Ave PacFab has been crocheting, and I felt compelled to learn.

I learned to chain and single crochet from my beloved late grandmother Mom-Bee, but I was too young when she died, so I never learned more. I thought I needed a better handle on crocheting before trying my hand at amigurumi (the japanese word for crocheted stuffed animals,) so I took home a simple how-to book and a bunch of acrylic yarn – Vanna White, who apparently crochets when she is not flipping letters, has a really nice acrylic yarn in a pretty range of rich colors that happens to be crazy cheap, so I started there.

In 2 hours, just from following instructions in a how-to book, I went from chaining to making lace trim! Crocheting turns out to be really easy! In the next two weeks, I made a whole granny-square afghan and a baby blanket, and decided I was ready to try my hand at amigurumi.

I learned when I began my first pattern from my new favorite book, Amigurumi World, that I didn’t really need much more than chaining and single crochet, so all of my preparation wasn’t really necessary, but now I feel like I could crochet anything, so I’m glad I really learned. My first critter was an owl, since I love them and I was raised by a bird-watching mom. I finished it in about three hours. By the next night, it had an owl friend, and now there is a turtle and a pair of octopi too.

They are enchanting – I feel like a kid and want to carry them everywhere. All of my friends seem to want one - I think I’m even going to teach my non-crafting best friend to crochet, so she can make a menagerie of her own.

I need help naming them, though – anyone have any good suggestions?

-Anna-Beth

Designer Embroidered Jeans in 4D ~ Part 2 ~ Choosing a Design

Now comes the fun part - choosing the design!

I purchased my first embroidery machine 10 years ago, and as a result, I likely own more embroidery designs than I will ever stitch out in my lifetime!  And I am very certain that I will continue to collect designs that capture my interest.

That being said, I think we are living in a golden age of machine embroidery, especially with more and more designers/design companies producing what I think of as 'modular designs'.  That is, design collections that contain multiple design components that are made to be combined into larger overall designs.  These are just perfect for incorporating into a pair of designer jeans!

For example, here is a vest made from a former pair of jeans that I embroidered (this is the 'Pant Leg Vest' from the book Denim by Design).  The designs are from 'Bella Fiori' by Jenny Haskins.  I saw this design stitched out on a pair of jeans at a Sew Fun a year and a half ago.  I liked it so much I bought the design, went home and created my own version.  Now that the the jeans had worn out, they were recycled into another Sew Fun project.  Talk about a life cycle!

But I digress.  In 4D it is especially fun to combine designs, as the software will remove any overlap in  embroidery designs.  Plus you can use the Stitch Density tool and the Design Optimizer tools in the 4D Stitch Editor to help tame some of the denser designs.

So what should you consider when choosing a design?

First of all, consider density.  Denim  weights vary, but even the heaviest denim can tend to pucker around designs if the embroidery is dense.  The denser the design, the more stabilizer is required.  Consider what type and thickness of stabilizer you are willing to live with on the inside of your jeans. 

Here is an example of a very dense design on denim.
These are a pair of my jeans embroidered with the 'Roses for Mary' design by Jenny Haskins.  I love this design; I think the roses are incredible (and I am very, very fond of roses!).  However these designs are very dense - sometimes I jokingly call these my 'Tin Man' or 'bulletproof' jeans!  They are very stiff.  I found that using Wet and Stick stabilizer did a good job, but I still had a fair amount of puckering around the design due to the sheer volume of thread being pushed into the fabric (the yarns in the denim fabric get displaced by the embroidery threads thus causing distortion).  But I still love them.  I just wish I'd used some No Show Fusible Mesh or similar afterward to make the back side a little softer against the skin.  The stiffness of the jeans leg combined with the thread and stabilizer makes for a less comfortable jean.

Here are some important things to consider when choosing a design for your designer embroidered jeans:

1) How do I envision my design?  A design collection that already has elements that are made to be interchangeable makes creating big designs much easier.

2) What is the scale of my embroidery design?  If you need to size up or down more than 20% in order to create the scale you envision,  you should probably reconsider using it.  Also consider the scale of your body.  I am tall, so large, bold designs are in proportion to my larger scaled body, and it is not unusual for me to increase the size of a design.  If I were petite, I could still use the same designs, but I would likely decrease the size proportionately.  Some of the Anita Goodesign fashion collections (for example) feature the same motifs in different sizes.

3) How dense are the designs?  As I mentioned above, the density of the designs affects the amount and density of stabilizer required for a clean, smooth stitchout.  In the vest at left, an old pair of jeans were cut up to make the 'Shawl Collar Vest' from the book Denim by Design.  I had interfaced the denim with a medium weight fusible interfacing to give the denim more body.  These designs - 'Louise' by Angie Spong - are of average to light density so they did not require much more in the way of stabilizer to stitch out without fabric distortion.

For my new pair of jeans, I've decided I'm going to use designs from the 'Fashion Roses' design collection by Anita Goodesign.   As I said, I'm very partial to roses!  They are my other obsession - apart from textiles and fiber arts!  Stay tuned next week for the next installment - Design layout!

Have a safe and wonderful 4th of July holiday!
--Katrina