After several hours of sewing and pinning and ironing, my baby blankets are finished. I had a bit of trouble with the first one because the fabric kept slipping off of the table when I was trying to sewing a straight line but the second one went much more smoothly. This is my last sewing project that I am going to do for our 20% assignment and I am happy to say that I feel pretty confident using a sewing machine. In the future I think I will continue to make small things like maybe a skirt or more baby blankets. Sewing is pretty time consuming and very detail oriented so I am not sure this will become my new passion. However, I am glad that I chose sewing for this project because sewing is a very useful skill that I am sure I will be able to use in the future. Below are some pictures of my finished blankets. I have given one of them to my sister in law and so far baby Samantha loves it!
So, little did I know but making baby blankets is much more difficult than pillowcases! I have decided to separate these posts into two because I have been working on my blankets but have not been able to complete them yet. So to begin this project I again had to cut and iron my fabric. This was much more difficult because I am now working with two times as much material. Two yards is much different than one! I almost didn't have enough room on my cutting board to fit it all. Once I got both sides of my blanket but and ironed I began to pin around all four sides of the fabric so I would be able to sew the two sides together evenly. The pinning took much longer than anticipated because I first pinned the wrong sides of the fabric together and had to start again from the beginning. Sewing takes a lot of patience and attention to detail that I do not typically have. I admit that I have had to step away from my projects several times so that I would not give up entirely! After I got all of the sides pinned I sat down to start sewing. That is where I am going to leave off until next week. Stay tuned to see completed baby blankets!
For this week I decided to make another pillowcase because although it was fairly straightforward for me last week, this week I do not have my mother-in-law around to help me if I got stuck. So this week, luckily using the most inexpensive fabric that I bought, I got out my scissors and sewing machine and started pillowcase number two. I measured my fabric out quickly and easily and then went straight to the iron to get all of the wrinkles out. Then I chose the thread that I wanted to use for the pillowcase, loaded it into the sewing machine and away I went. Unfortunately this did not last very long because the sewing machine jammed almost immediately :( After a lot of cutting and untangling of the needle, the fabric and the sewing machine I realized that I did not put the thread in the machine the right way but I was able to fix it. Then I sewed the hem and then sewed around the edges of my pillowcase. When I was finished with two of the three sides, I noticed that my pillowcase was extremely uneven. I panicked and thought the whole pillowcase was ruined! Decided to just keep going and ignore the huge mistake I finished the side I was working on. After studying the problem for a few minutes I decided to just cut of the uneven part of the fabric and hope that it would still fit on a standard size pillow. After I finished sewing around all of the edges, I ironed the pillowcase once again and then found a pillow to try it out on. It fit with no problem so I think that when I was in the cutting stage of my project I did not measure something correctly. Either way this pillowcase was another success and I am looking forward to trying out making two baby blankets next week!
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AuthorThis blog will be to document a project that I will be working on to display my creativity and to engage in learning a new skill. Archives
May 2016
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