Sunday, July 24, 2011

What to do with those beloved T shirts...

My daughter in law wanted a T shirt quilt as she didn't want to toss all her old T shirts and the memories that went with them. I said "of course"! I requested she pick the fabric as this is a really personal type project. She made some very nice choices. I used the Bernina Stitch Regular on my Artista 630E as I'm not too practiced with free form machine quilting. I don't really quilt - only when I need a quilt! This how the front turned out:

Since I used a quilt-as-you-go technique (no way was I forcing the whole quilt under this machine) so the back was pretty interesting too.

I wish this idea was around when I had some well loved T shirts but then quilting would have never occured to me at the time!

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

And now for something different, home dec!

I mostly make clothes but sometimes I want to do some home dec. I hate to buy too many things I can make for myself. Right now I'm redoing the master bedroom but this is something I did a recently when I wanted a dinning room table to look a bit more like Summer.

I took a look at the website for the Bernina 800 series machine and saw a really nice table runner for Summer. I don’t own an 830E – I don’t have the room, it won’t fit in the fabulous Rockler cabinet my wonderful Father in Law made for me and frankly I didn’t want a machine that cost twice what my first new car cost! I am very happy with My Artista 630E – it does everything I want and then some. So I thought “hey, I’ll bet I can do this on my 630E!” I was right!
I used the fabulous Mega Hoop frame that allows the machine to automatically split a very large design. In the software I set up the reeds to fill the frame and just rehooped it as needed to get multiple designs. It was really easy to rehoop as it aligned easily. The embroidery designs were from the OESD’s Reeds and Grasses set.
To go along with the runner I embroidered 10 cocktail napkins that I ordered from All About Blanks. They have some pretty neat blanks for things so I’m sure I’ll be back at that site in the near future. So this is now my Summer table runner – it dress up a very basic Tommy Bahama tablecloth for sort of an island vibe.
So this is what's on my table right now