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Lucky Stars: Beginning Adventures in Hand Sewing

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When I first started piecing, I used a black ballpoint pen to mark my fabric and then used a combination of a running stitch, a back stitch and machine sewing to put it all together. It was a huge mess, but the fabric did hold together. By the time I realized my ink would probably run everywhere and ruin the project I had a pillow-sized piece of patchwork. I was so disheartened I jumped to machine piecing and english paper piecing (EPP) and didn't try the running stitch again for years.  I'm happy to announce my fear of the running stitch has happily ended. I've started Lucky Stars from Millefiori Quilts 3 by Willyne Hammerstein and so far it has all been pieced by hand with a simple running stitch. I've bought silk pins, and frixion pens and everything is going quite smoothly. I'm really enjoying hand piecing so far, it's a lot faster and needs a lot less prepwork than EPP.  Here is my progress so far. I've finished sewing all of the "x" shapes. N...
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Simplicity 8193 Pattern Review

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I've decided to get into historical costuming. I'm not particularly worried about historical accuracy so maybe I should say I'm interested in history bounding and wearing historically inspired clothing. I have a lot to say about it and more to write about it, but I think I'll save that for another blog post.Today I'm going to talk about my experience sewing the Simplicity 8193 pattern, in the hope that other people who want to make this pattern feel more confident to do so. This isn't the first time I've tried to sew apparel clothing, but it is the first time I've sewn from a clothing pattern.The first times I've tried to make clothing were... less than successful. I also wanted to try learning to sew from patterns because I want to learn the sewing intuition that goes into sewing different types of garments. For example: which pattern pieces to sew first and what parts can be guessed at and which need to be exact.  For this garment, I saw that it...
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Improv Quilting: Adventures with Scraps!

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 I've been sewing my first button down shirt, and to do that I made a muslin mock up. Now that my shirt is 80% of the way done, I've been thinking of all the fun things I can do with the muslin fabric from the mock up. I definitely want to use all of it up. While it wasn't expensive, it is fully functional and therefore I don't want to waste it. Also, on a personal note I want to try and be low waste when possible, and recycle what I can. I took the muslin mock up scraps and black scraps from Riley's quilt and decided to try improv quilting to make a dish towel. The only rule I set for myself was no seam ripping. Whatever I sewed, I just went with it. I sewed the pieces together pretty randomly, just trying to maintain an interesting balance of black and white. If there was a lot of extra fabric on a seam, I sometimes left it because I don't need to worry about bulk for a simple dish towel. After piecing everything together, I quilted the top, trying to get clos...
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