Adelaide Lemonade

One More Japanese Sewing Tip

This is a really, really good one that I stumbled across while surfing the net last weekend in this great Japanese pattern drafting tutorial from Purl Soho (I totally want to visit there someday.  Have you been?).

I kind of skimmed the post because I thought I had the whole drafting thing pretty much figured out.  Then some Japanese characters jumped off the page at me.

Finally the mystery solved about which is the back and which is the front.  I had been limping along finding different ways to rationalize which was which.  What a simple, elegant solution!

I copied them down on a piece of paper to keep near me when I'm drafting and cutting.

It was kind of fun to try to draw the Japanese characters.  For all I know, I wrote something completely different.  Doesn't matter, it's close enough for me to tell which is which.  The last two patterns I made didn't have an obvious front and back, so this has already been a huge help.

I feel a little silly for not trying to figure this out sooner.  Oh well.  It's always good to have a challenge.

p.s. Happy Mardi Gras.  Are you giving anything up for Lent?  I've been to the dentist twice recently and they keep telling me how bad carbonation is for your teeth - even just sparkling water.  I love having a Diet Pepsi every once in a while (okay, like almost every day), and when I'm being "good" and drinking my water, I much prefer the sparkling kind.  So that's what I'm giving up for Lent - anything carbonated.  I'm even including beer.  Wish me luck.

Japanese Sewing Tips - Sewing!

Finally, we get to the sewing part.  I used to hate all the prep and just want to get sewing to the point where I would cut out the one or two pieces I needed to start with then sew those then go back to cutting and so on.  It wasn't very efficient, obviously.  For some reason, I actually don't mind the prep anymore.

Anyway, here's what I know (or at least guess) about sewing from Japanese patterns.

Tip #1 Which piece is which?  Since you don't have the benefit of actually being able to read the pattern, it can sometimes be really hard to tell what each piece is for.  It's pretty easy to tell which pieces are for the body or the sleeve or the collar, but how do you know which is the back and the front of the sleeve?  If you're making a shirt with no buttons or placket, how do you know the front from the back?

Most of the time the patterns have little tick marks with circles on the end that are similar to the little triangles on U.S. patterns (tip #9 here).  These are meant to help you line up the sleeve with the body in the right place, but you can often tell the back from the front for both the sleeves and the body by the fact that the backs of both have two tick marks where the fronts have only one.

I have made a few patterns where this was not the case.  Here are the assumptions I make:

Sleeves - the curvier part is usually the front.  The more gradual "slope" is usually the back.

Body - the wider piece with the more curvy hem is usally the front.  The back is usually slightly narrower and often has an almost straight hem.

Tip #2 Pictures, Pictures, Pictures.  If you're like me, you don't speak or read Japanese, so the only directions you're going to have are the pictures.  Amazingly, you can find out almost everything you need to know just from the pictures.  Have you ever put together a piece of furniture from IKEA?  Same kind of thing.  Every pattern I've seen so far has a picture like this:

 You know how almost every pattern you buy, sewing or knitting, recommends that you read through all the instructions before starting?  The equivalent for me is to look at the above picture and make sure I understand what it's telling me to do at each step.  Don't worry, there are a lot more pictures.  This is just kind of an overview.  It will probably make the most sense if I translate for you:

1.  Sew the shoulder seams.

2.  Make and attach the collar.

3.  Finish the edges of the collar with some bias tape.

4.  Sew the side seams.

5.  Hem the bottom.

6.  Make the sleeves.

7.  Set in the sleeves.

8.  Hem the sleeves and put elastic in them.

9.  Make the buttonholes and attach the buttons.

You can really figure all that out just by looking at the above photo, but you're probably going to want more details on exactly how they want you to make the collar, for example.  The next thing you're going to want to do then, is look at the detailed photos that are labeled with the number "2".  (Keep reading, I'll get into that in a minute.)

Tip #3 Watch out for page referrals.  So in the tip above, I just told you to look at the details for step 2.  In this particular pattern, there are no pictures for step 2.  Yikes.  What to do?  Well, the only time, I look at the actual "word" directions is when this happens.

Sure enough, step 2 is referring me to a different page.  See that - "p.53"?  In fact a bunch of steps refer me back to that page.  Here's what page 53 looks like.

The collar is a different shape than mine and the step numbers are different, but it's enough info for me to get the idea.

Tip #4 Watch out for the little steps inside of steps.  It will make more sense if I show you the photo first.

This is from step 11 of the blazer that I made for Addie.  It's for the little rectangle of a belt that goes on the back.  I chose this one to share because it's pretty straightforward, but you'll see this kind of thing everywhere in the Japanese patterns.  See the little numbers - 1 through 5 - with the circles around them?  Even though I'm already on step 11, those are the steps I need to do to complete step 11.  Like I said, this one is pretty straightforward.  Let me "translate":

1.  Sew the wrong sides together, leaving a gap at the bottom for turning.

2.  Clip the corners.

3.  Turn it right side out and whipstitch the gap closed.

4.  Top stitch

5.  Attach it to the jacket by sewing on the buttons.

Easy, right?

Tip #5 Pay attention to the order.  It's not necessarily going to be left to right, top to bottom like you're probably used to.  Here's a pretty simple example

See how Step 1 has 3 diagrams going from left to right, then the fourth is straight down, then Step 2 starts back on the left of the same "row"?  It's really pretty obvious once you know to pay attention to that.  And you can see from this example that the arrows guide you in the right direction.

Tip #6 Don't be afraid to look at other patterns.  My Oliver & S patterns have especially good step by step instructions - in English.  If you're making a shirt with a placket for buttons, for example, and can't quite figure out what the Japanese diagrams are telling you to do, pull out the instructions for your Jumprope dress for some help.

Tip #7 Use what you know!  I probably should have put this first and foremost.  You probably have already sewn at least a few garments, so you already know what you're doing.  I like to stay stitch my curves, trim my interfacing, and finish all my seams.  For all I know, the Japanese instructions are telling me to do just that, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't show up in the diagrams (well, the seam finishing usually does).  It seems silly, but it actually took me sewing quite a few things before I thought, "duuh, maybe it would be easier to fit that sleeve in if I stay stitched the curve and clipped in a bit".

That's all I have for tips.  I wish I could share some tips on getting your kids to actually wear the thing you made or some tips on getting good photographs with them in it, but those are things I struggle with way more than sewing!

Anyway, I hope this was helpful and made sense.  I would love to know if it inspired any of you to try out a pattern and would love to see your finished project.

Japanese Sewing Tips - Cutting your Fabric

I'm not sure how much I have to offer when it comes to cutting out the fabric pieces for your garment.  It's pretty much the same in any language, and different people have their different ways of doing it.  I'll share what I do in case it's helpful.

Tip #1 How much fabric to buy?  To be honest, I really haven't put much effort into trying to understand the Japanese pattern books instructions for how much fabric you need.  There are some measurements printed on the cutting diagrams.  The one I'm working on now says 150 cm wide and 50 cm tall, but it's doubled.  I assume then that when folded, it should be 75 cm wide, but I don't really know.  What I do know is about how much fabric it takes to make a short sleeved shirt for 4-year-old Addie (about a yard),  a pair of pants for Addie (about 1 1/2 yards), a short, straight skirt for Addie (about half a yard).  So my tip here, which really isn't much of a tip, is get the fabric amounts from other patterns you have (or take a peak at the ones at a local fabric store) that are similar.  Or you can just go with your gut feel.

I don't try to cut the same way they show in the pattern diagrams.  That just seems to complicated to me.  If I'm worried I won't have enough fabric, I kind of lay out the body pieces and sleeves, and if it looks like I'll have enough for those, I go for it.  I figure there will be enough scraps for collars and facings - or I can always use a contrast fabric for those.

 Tip #2 Look at the cutting diagram to figure out what fabric to cut.  The diagram below is for the blazer I finished over the weekend and posted about yesterday.

You can see that there are two different boxes.  The one on the bottom is showing me to cut those pieces in contrasting fabric.  Then the dotted pieces are telling me to cut interfacing - in addition to the piece out of that fabric.  (At least that's what I think.  I remember thinking how cool - how revolutionary even - it was that Japanese patterns never called for interfacing.  Then I realized that I wouldn't really know whether they did or not and started noticing the dotted pattern pieces.  duuh.)

Oh yeah, and that really elongated "C" between the two boxes is telling you to fold the fabric above.  The fabric below is not folded.  You can also see in the upper right corner of the top box where a corner of the fabric is folded down the reveal the two layers.  It's really all in the diagrams - and pretty straightforward once you get used to it.

Tip #3 How I cut.  This really shouldn't be a tip at all.  This is just how I do it.  In blog-land, I've seen several people using pattern weights and rotary cutters to do all their cutting.  I'm very intrigued by this but haven't been brave enough to try it yet.  I stick with the old method of pinning down all my pattern pieces.  Here's a shirt back piece all dutifully pinned to the fabric.

I do use my rotary cutter to cut all my straight lines.  It doesn't save a ton of time, but it does help a bit.

I use my trusty old scissors for all the curves.

You can see that I don't bother to precut all the pattern pieces from the tracing material.  I just cut it right along with the fabric.  Then the pieces are all set for the next time I make the same pattern without the extra step.

Tip #4 Mark your fabric.  I like to wait until the last minute to do this - until I'm actually going to use the piece.  It helps remind me of sleeve placement, button placement, etc. closer to the time when I'm actually going to do that.  So unless I'm running out of pins or need to reuse a pattern piece, I leave it pinned to the fabric until I'm ready to use it.  Then I snip all the little snips (you know the little tick marks with the circles on the end that I mentioned in Tip #9 here) and mark all the other things - buttonholes, pocket placement, etc. either with pins or my fabric marker.  The other advantage of waiting to do this until the last minute is that pins can fall out and fabric marker can fade.

That's it for cutting tips.  I'll be back soon with sewing tips.

Thanks for reading along.  I hope you're getting inspired and not overwhelmed.

Japanese Sewing Tips - Tracing the Pattern Pieces - Part Two

Here are the rest of my tips for tracing pattern pieces from your Japanese sewing books.

Tip #6 - No need to go crazy.  For the first pattern or two that I traced, I was really worried about complete accuracy.  I ironed the pattern paper (low iron, no steam) and taped my tracing material on to the pattern sheet.  I'm still pretty careful, but I find that smoothing out the pattern sheet with my hands and using a spare ruler to hold down my tracing material works just fine.  I don't have any pattern weights yet, but that would probably work great, too.

Tip #7 - Take a look at the cutting diagram.  I hardly ever do this for English patterns.  For the Japanese patterns, it's more to figure out which pieces I need to cut out than anything else.  Here's an example of one:

So I can see from this that I need to cut out a back and a front, 2 sleeves, 2 collar pieces, and a long strip - probably some bias tape or neck facing.

Actually finding the pieces can be quite challenging - like "Where's Waldo" but worse.  So far, in my experience, once I find one piece on a page (most of my books have come with 1 or 2 huge pages of pattern pieces on both sides - so, at most, you only have to look at 4), the rest of the pieces are on that same page.  If your cutting diagram has some long, rectangular strips, you won't necessarily find them on the pattern sheet.  You can see from the diagram above that the pattern calls for 2 strips that are 3 cm wide.  There's probably a length measurement that I cut off in the photo.  We all can cut a rectangle without a pattern piece, so it's probably just as well that they're not included in the pattern sheet.  I have only one pattern for a skirt with a waistband that did have the pattern piece - probably more for the button placement than anything else. 

Because there's so much overlap of the pieces, you really have to find one line . . .

Then sort of trace it all around with your eyes (and eventually your pen/pencil) to figure out which piece it is and where it starts and ends.  You can see that instead of having a big fat letter in the middle of the pattern piece, there's just a relatively small letter pointing to one of the lines.  It's pointing at the 130 size line, so if you're not making that size, find the closest line to the size you are making.  You can see the 100, 110, 120, and 130 that this pattern came in in the photo above.

One thing these patterns do have in common with English patterns is that they do use a letter to represent the item of clothing that you are making and luckily they are English characters.  In this case I was tracing the sleeve for shirt pattern "H".

The other reason to look at the cutting diagram is that all seam allowances are not created equal.  I only just realized this recently.  See the little "2" near the center bottoms of the sleeves, front, and back?  That's telling you to add a 2 cm seam allowance there instead of whatever you've been using.  If it's not indicated in the diagram, then you just use your regular seam allowance.  You can also see that it's telling me to do something funky with the bottom of the piece on the left.  (I haven't quite figured out what to do yet, but it looks like I need to add 3 cm on the left, and cut a little rectangle out of the bottom.)

Tip #8 - Watch out for pieces inside pieces.  I recently made a shirt where no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't find the back neck facing piece.  I finally decided that I would just trace the neck on the back pieces and just cut a few inches below the back line.  As I was thinking about how I would do that, it occurred to me that I had seen the exact same thing on the pattern piece for the back.  There was the back piece which I traced then inside of that - right where you would sew it - was the back neck facing piece.  I know that would make much more sense with a photo.  I'll try to add one tonight.

The other tricky thing is that sometimes you can make both a dress and a shirt with the same front and back pattern pieces, so even when you've found the right piece, make sure you're selecting the right length. 

Tip #9 - Pay attention to the symbols.  There are a few different indicators to tell you where to cut or where to place a button or a pocket.  These are on the actual pattern pieces (not in the cutting diagram).  I think the symbols are pretty self-explanatory, but you sometimes have to really look to find them.  Because there is so much overlap of all the pieces, it can be really hard to see all the different pattern markings.  I try to take a look and get an idea where they all are in a certain piece before I lay down my tracing material - just because they're a bit easier to see that way.  (I still forget sometimes.  Sometimes I even have to whip out the whole big-butt pattern piece while I'm in the middle of sewing because I just know there should have been a mark somewhere that I didn't make.)

The most important one is the dashed line.  They're pretty big dashes, so you might not notice at first, but this indicates a fold line.  If you cut on this line instead of placing the piece on your fabric's fold, that's a pretty much unrecoverable mistake.  (I suppose you could sew them together with a small seam.)

The other really useful one is a little tick mark with a circle at the end of it.  These are the equivalent of the little arrows you see in most typical patterns written in English.  Those little arrows that are such a pain in the butt to cut out.  For Japanese sewing, I just cut a little snip into the fabric's seam allowance wherever I see one of the little tick marks then line up my snips instead of lining up the arrows.

Here's an example of what they look like:

This happens to be the top back of a sleeve.  You don't have to mark and snip all 8 tick marks.  If you look closely, you can see that there are two for each size.  You only have to mark and snip the 2 for the size you're making.  Don't forget to bring them out to the new line you're drawing with the seam allowance.

These little tick marks can appear anywhere on the pattern pieces, but they're almost always at the center, back, and front of a sleeve - the top curvy part - with corresponding ones on the front and back body pieces - the armpits.  The two tick marks usually indicate the back of the sleeve and the single one indicates the front.

Some other common places you'll need to mark are pockets:

(See the lighter colored dashed lines?  These are where you'll place your pocket - not fold lines in this case.)

And buttonholes.

(The one on the top is the same for all sizes.  The bottom one is slightly different for each size.  You'll obviously mark the one you're making.)

The line with arrows on either end is the grainline, just like in most U.S. patterns.

Tip #10 - Label your pattern pieces.  So there's not going to be the nice little directions that come with U.S. patterns, like "Cut 1 on fold" or "Cut 2 fabric, cut 2 interfacing" or even "bodice back" or "sleeve", but you can certainly provide those labels yourself - after all you worked so hard to figure it all out.  I usually write the name of the book (which I sometimes make up if there's no English name on the book like "Bubble Dress Girl"), the letter of the pattern, the pattern piece, and the size.  Here's a sleeve pattern piece all cut out.

I should mention that I don't precut all the pattern pieces.  There's really no need to do that.  I just trace them then when I get ready to cut the fabric, I just sloppily cut around them enough to free them from the rest of the pattern pieces, then cut them at the same time as I cut the fabric.  I know that probably doesn't make much sense.  I'll include some pictures when I do a post about cutting the fabric -  hopefully tomorrow.  Just know that you don't have to neatly cut all the pattern pieces out of your tracing material.

Tip #11 - Keep your patterns organized.  You've already done a ton of work and you found some nice, durable tracing material, and the patterns are just so darn cute that you're probably going to want to make the same pattern a bunch of times.  Or better yet, combine different pattern pieces to create a completely new design.  So you might as well keep them nice and organized.  I bought a box of these big envelopes at Staples two years ago when I was doing virtual quilting bees. 

It was nice to have the envelopes on hand back then, but they've also come in really handy for all my pattern pieces.  I try to use one envelope per pattern, per size. 

Whew!  I hope this is all helping.  I didn't expect to have so many tips about tracing the pattern pieces.  I'm not sure I'll have so many about the rest of the process, but this is probably the hardest - and least fruitful - part.

Don't hesitate to post a comment or shoot me an e-mail if you have any questions.

Japanese Sewing Tips - Tracing the Pattern Pieces - Part One

I feel a little pretentious trying to dole out tips for sewing in Japanese when 1.  I don't consider myself an expert seamstress and 2.  I don't speak or read Japanese.  (My worst fear is that someone who speaks Japanese and sews really well will read this and chuckle at all the mistakes I'm making.)  I do have some things that seem to work for me though, so I thought I would try to share.

I was pretty overwhelmed when I cracked open my first Japanese pattern book.  Nothing is what you're used to - some of the books even go from what I would consider back to front.  There's a lot to figure out - as if sewing in your own language isn't hard enough.  The best tip I can give is to pick a pattern that you're really motivated to sew.  Yes, it's good to start with something simple, but if you don't love it, you might give up more easily and end up neglecting your beautiful Japanese pattern books and using them for nothing more than pretty pictures.

Okay - enough lecture - here are my tips for tracing the pattern pieces.

Tip #1 - Yes, you do have to trace the pattern pieces.  Don't even think you're going to cut out the one pattern you want from the paper insert that came with the book and throw away the rest.  I'm only saying this because I've done this before.  I was very sorry when I did that for the size 3 Oliver & S Jumprope dress and later wanted to make the size 4.  Even if you're quite sure you'll never, ever care about that, these pattern inserts are a big spider-webby mess of overlapping pattern pieces that make cutting out even one pattern almost impossible.

Tip #2 - Find some good pattern tracing material.  I've tried tissue paper and lightweight interfacing.  Both of those just frustrated me.  I finally found the solution at one of my local fabric stores, Sew Portland, in this Bosal Create a Pattern.  It comes in a 5 yard roll which can cover quite a few patterns.  It lays nice and flat and even kind of sticks to your fabric when it comes time to cut.  I love the stuff.

Tip #3 - Figure out what size you're going to make.  Easy, right?  I almost gave up right then and there.  I'm used to making a size 4 or 5 for my 4-year-old.  What's up with this 110, 120, stuff?  Most of the books have a little diagram like this:

in between the photo pages and the how-to-make pages.  This one is from one of my Happy Homemade books.  Some of the books I've purchased more recently don't have the nice little image of the girl, but this one is especially helpful so you can match the Japanese words to the body parts.  

In this case, if my daughter is 120 cm tall with a 62 cm chest and a 53 cm waist and 65 cm hips - or measurements somewhat close to that, I would make the size 120.  I haven't played around with mixing sizes, but you could certainly do that the way you would with any other pattern.

To be honest, I haven't really measured since the first pattern I made.  Then I had nothing to relate the size to, so I really needed to do this to figure out where to start.  If someone could have told me size 100 = size 3, etc., I would have just gone with that.  I definitely wouldn't want to be responsible for you making the wrong size, but, so far, in my experience, for my pretty average-sized daughter; 100 = size 3, 110 = size 4, and 120 = size 5/6.  I also take into account the photos - just a bit.  I've been making the size 120 for everything lately, but one shirt I wanted to make was really baggy in the photos, so I decided to make one size down.

Whew, I guess I could have done a whole post on size alone!

Tip #4 - Relax and Make some Room.  Tracing the pattern pieces is probably the most difficult and frustrating part of the whole process.  Don't try to do this in the 10 free minutes you have between work and driving one of the kids to soccer practice.  Make sure you have plenty of time and do whatever else you need to do to fend off frustration and increase concentration.  Grab a glass of wine, kick the kids (and definitely the cat) out of the room - whatever it takes.  Also make sure you have plenty of room.  You really need to be able to spread out the whole pattern paper.  You'll want plenty of light, too.

I'm far from a neat freak, but my sewing desk is usually already pretty free of clutter, so I just put my sewing machine down on the floor, then I have plenty of room for pattern tracing.  While I have everything set up, I like to trace 3 or 4 patterns that I know I'm going to make at a time.

Tip #5 - Yes, you have to add seam allowances.  I didn't know this at first - or didn't want to know it.  The first thing I made just happened to work somehow, but the second thing I made didn't even come close to fitting over my daughter's head.  After getting some tips from some readers on how to add seam allowances, I ended up taping two pens together.

Wherever there's a curve, even a slight one, I trace right on my size line with the green pen and the black pen creates the line where I'll eventually cut.  Wherever there's a straight line, I just use one of my quilting rulers.  I line the 3/8" line up with the line on the pattern then draw a line along the ruler for my cutting line.  Your seam allowance can be whatever you want it to be - unless otherwise indicated by the cutting diagram* - as long as you keep it the same throughout.  My two pens end up being about 3/8".

Shoot, I'm running out of time.  I have a few more tips about pattern tracing I want to share, so check back in tomorrow for those.

*More on this tomorrow.

Tree Pillow Tutorial - Finally!

I finally finished the tutorial for this pillow.  The tutorial is here.  I hope you'll give it a try.

Here's the original tree pillow that I made.  More about that in this post.

Coaster Tutorial

You know - the things you put your drinks on to protect your furniture.  Funny story about coasters . . .

But before I launch into that, don't forget about my little giveaway here.  Comments close tonight at 8:00 PM EST

A couple of years ago my sister and I (along with my mom and assorted children) were visiting my grandparents in Florida.  Since I like to try to go to a quilt shop or yarn shop everywhere I go, everyone obliged me and we piled into my mom's big rental van and checked out Magrieta's Quilt Shop.  Great selection - I'll have to do a review of that shop another day - if I can remember enough about it.

So my sister's not really as into crafting as I am, but I'm constantly trying to persuade her to do projects with me.  I'm sure I'm actually kind of a pain in the butt about it.  This time she actually caved and we bought the fabric to make this quilt.  It didn't take us too long to make the top and we finally did get it sandwiched.  

We live about two hours apart but try to get together every few months (which often turns into 6 months or more) to sew together along with my mom, so it took us a couple of these sewing weekends to get to this point.  On our third weekend we finally got to the quilting part.  I was very excited about showing my sister how to do free motion quilting.

She struggled with it a bit as you might imagine someone would on their first time.  I had practiced a lot before I did my first quilt, so I suggested she do the same.   I told her she could try making some coasters or a pillow or something.  She just very calmly said, "no, I'm not ready to give up yet, I think I'll try a little more."  Something in the way she said it made me realize that she thought I was suggesting she cut up her quilt and make coasters or pillows out of it.

I think you had to be there, but for some reason that totally cracks me up even now when I think about it.  First of all that she just didn't say, "What the *&^#$ are you talking about?!  I worked hard on this, I'm not about to chop it up." or something like that.  Second of all that the concept of starting another project in the middle of one would be so foreign to her as to not even cross her mind and so second nature to me that I wouldn't have imagined being misunderstood.

Anyway, so for Christmas, I just had to make her some coasters.  Here's the cute little set that I made for her.

I used my own fabric covered box tutorial to make the box.  It ended up being just about the perfect size.  If you want to try this yourself, the only thing you need to modify following my box tutorial is to use a 7 1/2" x 7 1/2" piece of chipboard (instead of the 11 1/2" x 11 1/2" one in the tutorial) and an 11" x 11" piece of fabric (instead of the 19" x 19" one in the tutorial).  Your sides will end up being 1 1/4" high instead of the 3 1/4" in the tutorial, so just modify where you draw your lines accordingly.  (Just leave a comment if you have any questions about this.)

I'm sure you can all figure out how to make your own coasters, but here's a little tutorial on how I did it, just in case.  I didn't want to go to the effort of doing a binding on them, so this is the shortcut method I used.  I ended up making three sets (well I'm almost done - you can see I haven't done the edge stitching and quilting yet), since I think they'd be nice hostess gifts for holiday parties.

Quilted Coaster Tutorial

1.  Make 6 little 5" x 5" quilt blocks.  I just grabbed some coordinating scraps and tried not to think about it much.  You could even just use one piece of 5" x 5" fabric and not do any piecing.

2.  Cut 6 - 5" x 5" pieces of coordinating fabric for the backs of the coasters.

(Just pretend there are 6 in most of these pictures.  I had already made my first experimental coaster - that I didn't take pictures of.)

3.  Cut 12 - 4 1/2" x 4 1/2" squares of fusible fleece.

4.  Fuse the fleece to the back of both your backing squares and your pieced front squares.  The fleece is a bit smaller, so make sure you center it.  Just eye-ball it - no need to be fussy and measure it exactly.  If you've never used fusible fleece before, the bumpy side goes face down on the wrong side of your fabric.  Don't try to iron the back of the fleece though, flip the whole thing over and iron on the front side of the fabric.

(Here they are flipped back over.)

5.  Pin the back and the front of each coaster together - right sides together.  Make sure you leave a gap for turning.  I put in some extra pins to help remind myself to stop sewing to leave the gap.

6.  Stitch (almost) all the way around leaving a gap of about 2 inches for turning.  Use a 1/4" seam and backtrack over your stitches at the beginning and end to keep them from unraveling.

7.  Clip the corners.

8.  Turn right side out.

9.  Poke out the corners with a knitting needle or some such tool.

10.  Press and try to neaten up the raw edges of the gap as much as possible - tuck them in before you press and they should not even be noticeable.

11.  Pin the gap closed.  (I was trying to be really fussy and get this nice and neat, but I think you could probably skip this step.)

12.  Edge stitch about 1/8" in all the way around.  That way you'll sew the gap shut in the process.

13.  Then quilt as desired!  To prove my point that coasters were a good way to practice quilting, I quilted each one differently.  I did three with my walking foot and more or less straight lines; concentric squares, diagonal lines (to make diamond shapes), and curvy parallel lines.  I did the other three with free motion quilting and my darning foot; classic stippling, pebbles, and a wavy-kind of shape.

Have fun!

Giveaway Day and Four Square Bag Tutorial

Few!  I just finished typing up a tutorial for this little bag.  I really wanted to have it available to all of you on Giveaway Day, so that even if you don't win, you still get something for free.  The tutorial is here.

For Giveaway Day, I'm giving away the finished product to one lucky winner.  It's the very same bag you see in the photo, and the one that's in all the tutorial photos, so you could even say it's famous.  Don't worry I made several prototypes before I made the tutorial, so it's not like it's an experiment or anything.  (Nothing against experiments.  They can come out great, too.)

For a chance to win, just comment on this post between now and December 6th, 2009.  I'll randomly select a winner from the list of comments.  I will be happy to ship it within the US and Canada, but unfortunately, I'm too intimidated by all the forms at the post office to ship more internationally than that.  (I'll be learning soon though, since I'm in a Quilting Bee with some international members, so next year I'll open it up to everyone.)  I will ship it by the 12th in case you want to use it as a holiday gift.  I'm hoping to whip up a few more for my kids teachers myself.

Oh, and if you make anything from this tutorial or either of my other ones, I'd love to see it.  You can post it in my flickr photo group.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Fabric Covered Box Tutorial

Yeah!  I finally completed my second tutorial.  This one is for a fabric covered box.  I've had the photos done for a few weeks now and some notes written down, but I was so inspired by all of the nice comments on my Bread Bag Tutorial that I knew I just had to stop procrastinating and get this done.  I don't want to just be a one-tutorial-wonder.

Back in the olden days when I was a teenager, I used to make fabric covered jewelry boxes and sell them at craft fairs.  It was fun, and it helped me realize that I probably wasn't going to get rich at crafting any time soon and should get a real job.  Amazingly, I saved my leftover supplies all these years, and even more amazingly, I hadn't had the urge to repeat that particular craft until recently.  I wanted to make some pretty boxes to store, organize, and display my fabric - especially my fabric scraps.  There's a lot of great tutorials out there already for boxes and baskets made completely out of fabric.  There are also some really cute ones in the Tone Finnanger books I bought recently.  (They - the books that is - are listed in my little Amazon widget on the right if you want to check them out.)

And I was about to give one of them a try when I remembered my old boxing business.  For me these are a little faster than the all fabric type, since there's no sewing involved, and I like that they hold their shape better than the fabric only boxes.  (Not that I don't still want to make a bunch of the fabric only ones as well.)

Hope you enjoy.

UPDATE:  Several people have commented on the fabric I used for this box.  Don't you just love it?!  It's called Sorbet.  It's by Moda, and I think it comes in a couple different colorways.  I believe this one is called Watermelon.  I bought mine at Sew Portland.  I did a quick search of my favorite on-line shops, Sew Mama Sew and Fabric Shack.  Unfortunately neither of them have it, but a quick Google search did bring up some hits.

My first tutorial!

I'm so excited that I finally completed my first tutorial.  What a lot of work?!  I really wanted to do it, but I also really struggled with wanting to actually create something tangible - not just words and photos.  I'm really into baking my own bread, and I needed some kind of container for it, so this tutorial is for a bread bag.  I'm planning to submit it to the Sew Mama Sew Scrap Buster contest.  Wish me luck and I hope you enjoy the tutorial.