Serger Project 1

E-Reader
Click for free Bernina pattern by Kellie Rushing 

Okay, I admit it.  I REALLY don’t like sergers.  I use them as little as possible in my sewing classes, but I know I need to use them more.  So I signed up for serger club at Studio Stitch.  They MIGHT change my mind, but the jury is still out.


I would much rather do clothing construction start to finish BY HAND as opposed to using a serger for any of the steps.  I think this stems back to my early childhood.  Mother made my clothes and did a fantastic job.  Sergers were not so readily available  for the home sewist fifty years ago, so if a classmate had something on with a serged finished, it was obviously store bought and made with far less love than what my mother made for me.  I used to feel sorry for the girls who had to wear store bought clothes, and a serged seam was a dead give away.

Flea Market Serger Find

However, home sewing has come a long way and many of us now have sergers.  I have two...they just stay in the closet.  (How did you like that explanation about why I don’t use a serger very often?  I’m sure you would never think that the real reason is that I don’t have the patience to put four or five different threads through 5,699 different holes, thread guides, and tension discs! In my high school class, if a student unthreads a serger, they have to put a dollar in the serger jar.  Anyone who threads a serger gets a dollar!  Ninth graders will do anything for a dollar around lunch time!)  

Let’s go back to today’s story.  A friend was able to stay with my husband so I could run out for a quick class at Studio Stitch.  It was so good to get a couple of hours away after the hub's recent ER visit.  In class we were making a cover for our e-Readers from a Bernina pattern by Kellie Rushing.   It took me awhile to get the threading right on my “borrowed” serger.  (We are buying a Bernina serger for my school classroom so Studio Stitch let me use one today to get accustomed to it!)  Justiann finally convinced me to do EXACTLY the same thing with the serger that I tell my students to do with the conventional machine  when there’s a problem. I needed to unthread it totally and rethread it from scratch.  It’s just a little more complicated to do that with a serger, so I tried to avoid doing it.  However, a couple of re-threadings later it was working great.

(It turns out that my left-handed nature gets me even when threading sergers.  I try to thread left to right through thread guides when they want right to left, and vice versa.)  

After all the time threading and re-threading, the actual e-Reader case only took about 20 minutes to finish.  It was super-easy, after I sorted through my left-handed spatial challenges (Definitions for the words “width” and “length” were a little challenging today!)   I’m now on the search for any of my friends who have e-Readers!  Guess what they are going to get for Christmas!  My sample leaves a lot to be desired, but now that I’ve conquered the basic concept I’m thinking of doing some embroidery on them and turning them out one weekend for gifts.  It will be a good way to use from my fabric stash, practice serging skills, and give a gift all at once. If I become familiar enough with the pattern, it can go into the supplemental projects that my first year students are allowed to do if they finish assigned projects in class.
Here’s the funny thing.  After the class I came home and got the old Elna serger out of the cupboard and actually threaded it and began serging a bit. It took two hours to get it up and running, using a manual that I had located on the Internet. (This serger was a $5.00 flea market find, no manual included.)  You might notice in the picture that each cone has a different color thread, just like the manual said to do to check the tensions on the stitch. That Justiann at Studio Stitch may just make me move out of my comfort zone.    I guess I just needed a push.  I’m looking forward to next month’s serger club!

Random Projects

Bold Hearts and Stars B.O.

It seems like I’m always updating this blog sitting at the hospital with my husband!  We are in the ER right now waiting for xrays from a fall.  

During the last two weeks life has been so full of school related responsibilities  (i.e. conferences) that there hasn’t been room for serious quilting.  But never fear -- I was able to work a few things in.

One evening after a rough day I was nearly brain dead but I absolutely needed a fabric fix.  So I pulled out my box of “Blocks - Cut but not sewn” and put to “hearts and stars” together.  One is in a bright child oriented colorway and one is in feminine pinks.   Here’s a pic of the bold one.  

Sometimes I’m in a cutting mood and I’ll cut five or six blocks and put them in the “Blocks - Cut but no sewn” box.  That makes it easy to feel quickly productive when I only have an hour to spare.  I can put together a block that has forty or fifty pieces in it in a short period of time without too much thought, as long as I did my cutting when I was more alert!

Another evening I was still not up to tackling anything new so I walked to mom’s to see what she was working on.  She had gotten stalled on a scrappy block baby quilt.  The corners of the blocks didn’t quite match so she was ready to just stop work on it.  She let me take it to play with.  I applied a french binding and hand stitched it in place.  Who cares that the blocks don’t match exactly?  My mom is 74 -- I think the work is pretty awesome.  We will just ask the baby to throw up on the corners of any blocks that don’t match and no one will notice the blocks are slightly off!

Yesterday I took off with a quilting friend to a gigantic “cloth shop” a couple of hours away from us.  It took us much longer to get there than anticipated.  But I told my friend that it may have been the Lord’s way of keeping us out of an accident that could have been happening had we arrived earlier.  But now on second thought, I think I’ve figured out what Jesus was doing!  Because we took longer to get there, we didn’t have as long to shop in the store.  That was his way of making sure I had money to eat on the rest of this month.  We just got paid and I blew my allotment of play money for the month in less than an hour.  However, I did get quilt backs for six quilts.  My goal is to get these six quilted before Christmas (plus the one I have on the frame right now.)  AND,   I only bought one new piece of fabric that doesn’t yet fit into a quilt!  I was the model of restraint.  (It helped that my friend had already GIVEN me three fat quarters and a 1/2 yard of fabric from her stash before we left home!)

I intended to spend this evening working on Block Lotto’s block of the month.  However, the best laid plans of mice and men go astray.  So I’ll do some applique work while sitting here in the hospital.  

Hey, great news.  Hubs is going home with me from hospital.  It’s only a broken collar bone this time!  Yeah!  I might get to do those blocks this evening after all (and look for the cell phone that I lost during the rush to the hospital!)