Sanity Sewing

I just made that up-“Sanity Sewing” is what you do just before you go crazy and after you have worked hard on your book and prepping for Houston for months! Don’t get me wrong, this is all good stuff and every single teacher at Houston is in the same boat. I just HAD to do something for fun so I took one measly afternoon off and made scarves. I made scarves because I have a Short Girl Problem. I’m not that short, 5’4″, but many things are just a wee bit too long such as necklaces and scarves. Case in point:

It may not be obvious, but this scarf is too long and it bugs me. For awhile there, the Nordstrom’s girl’s dept was carrying super cute scarves and they were perfect, but they no longer carry nice girl’s scarves. I decided to make my own.

NOTE: My hair is super cute here because I just got my color “refreshed” and it was cut and styled by my talented hairdresser and it will never look this good again in my hands!

This was a very gadgety experience-as you will see, specialized presser feet and Terial Magic were necessary for my success. I do have some background in garment sewing and one thing I learned from the little bit of couture sewing I did was that the most important thing was….control, control of your fabric. Terial Magic does that for me.

I found some fabulous 60″ two-sided double gauze with different colors on each side. Sixty inches was the perfect length to make a Short Girl Scarf. I began by stabilizing the edges with a generous spray of Terial Magic. It makes the fabric as stiff as paper-much easier to control.

I’m basically making a rolled hem here and I start by setting down a line of stitching 1/4″ from the edge. Are you beginning to see why I needed Terial Magic. That fidgety floppy fabric would have been very difficult to control here.

I cut that back to make it a 1/8″ edge.

Now let’s begin the roll by pressing it down just beyond the line of stitching.

Roll it again and stitch at the very edge by using your edge stitching foot and bopping the needle to the right a wee bit. Then you get this perfect line of stitching right at the edge of the roll. Slick huh?

As I did this stitching, there were all kinds of annoying little whisps of threads. I used my cleaning brush to whisk them into the seam to be hidden.

Hem all finished-flat, neat and even. The right presser foot helps this a lot. Now, on to the seam to join the ends.

Since this was a two-sided fabric I didn’t have to worry about “right sides”. I sewed a 1/4″ seam, then pressed the seam.

Encase that seam with the fabric and sew a generous 3/8″ seam, making sure you are completely encasing the raw edges.

I wanted to topstitch that seam down so it wouldn’t be protruding and floppy. But now I have something like 8 layers and the fabric would not feed properly so I had to use my “bumpers”. These are those little pieces of plastic that come with your machine-3 layers. You put however many you need to make your presser foot even and put them underneath the back edge of the presser foot. Sew your seam as usual. You will quickly sew off of the bumper, but you are now far enough onto the fabric that it is feeding well.

There we go-joining seam done, scarf done!

You can see the length of the scarf on my body-basically to my crotch.

Now that is how a scarf is supposed to lay! I made another one but don’t have a photo yet. Now it’s back to the salt mines! I’m linking up with Nina-Marie’s Off the Wall Friday. I’m off to Houston on Tues. I’ll try to get the rest of my PIQF photos up after that.