offcntr | Entries tagged with threads

Haven't been to the Lane County Fair in quite a few years, it always seems to fall on a busy week for us. This time, it happens I could squeeze in a day between kiln, Market, and getting ready for Anacortes, so I took Sunday afternoon to go down. Grabbed a sun hat, my water bottle, and the sketchbook and watercolor kit, and set off.

Buses used to be free fair week, but I couldn't find any evidence of that on the LTD website, and it was a nice, cool day, so I decided to ride my trike down. All went well until a rough patch by the Rose Garden, when I started to hear worrying noises from the chain. Right around 7th and Monroe, the pedal started freewheeling: the secondary drive chain had come off the gears. Fortunately, it hadn't broken, so I was able to pull over to the curb, lay it on its side and get the chain situated, at the expense of some very greasy fingers.

I'm not that interested in the rides or Midway anymore, and I'd just had lunch (and besides, the Democrats weren't grilling chicken this year), so I headed to the animal barns. Admired the fluffy bunnies and and the tiny bantam hens with even tinier chicks, watched the miniature goats play king-of-the-hill on the hay bales, and got a nice new painting of a bronze turkey hen.

But when I went to the next building, I got a disappointment: the large livestock barns were all closed. No pigs, no sheep, no cows. Huge disappointment. The horses were still in residence, so I got to see some trim little Gypsy Cobs--pony-sized and dainty, with feathered hooves--and a lovely big Norwegian Fjord with the bi-colored mane. There were also a mammoth donkey jack and jenny, and a really big mule--I'm guessing quarter horse/mammoth donkey cross. There was a pretty little miniature horse foal, only four months old, who got a special award for being "so brave in the show ring." And a little boy named Steel got to meet his namesake, a blue roan filly also named Steel.

But without the other livestock, I was done rather early, so I went in the exhibit halls, took a look at the quilts, walked around the commercial booths, and treated myself to an ice cream cone at Prince Pucklers (fudge brownie and salted caramel) and biked home again.

It's gone back to grey and chilly in the morning, after a week of almost-summer. I'm feeling a little creaky at Market set-up, so I decide to feature my creekiest plates: river otter and raccoon and duck (not shown).

We've been having parking issues with Farmer's Market customers, of late. Last week, three of them pulled in to the middle of our load-in, reverse angle-parked like the vendors, then walked away to get their produce. I managed to catch the third one to explain that, no, they really shouldn't be doing that, then tipped off Market security to have a word with the others as they came back with their strawberries. This week, I had to explain to an entitled SUV with California plates that, no, he couldn't park here, it's a loading zone for Saturday Market until 10 am, then had to follow him down the block and say no, not here either. Why do you open at 9 o'clock if there's no parking? he snarled. We don't, I replied, that's the Farmer's Market. We're not them.

That's part of the problem. What looks like one big event is actually three. There's the Saturday Market, the corners of two blocks south of 8th Street on either side of Oak; Farmer's Market, the northwest corner of that intersection, and Free Speech Plaza, on the northeast. Three different entities.

Farmer's Market opens at 9 am sharp--in the past, they used to penalize vendors for selling early, though I don't know if they still do--and closes at 3 pm. Saturday Market, which features handmade art and craft, made by the seller (and also hot ready-to-eat food), runs from 10 to 4. We stagger the hours to make set-up and take-down less chaotic. Free Speech Plaza, gods only know what their rules are. You can sell anything, homemade, imported from China, you name it; you only need a $5 monthly permit from the city.

It doesn't help that they're tearing up the streets in both directions. Also, the helpful rectangular "Loading Zone Only during [time]" signs on the parking meter stems have been replaced by smaller, triangular signs on the body of the meters themselves, graphically very nice, but hard to read or even notice from a moving car.

What frustrates me is that there's plenty of parking two blocks south in the OverPark, or one block west in the Parcade. It's even free on Saturday, which street parking is not.

That said, once 10 o'clock rolled around, it was a pretty good day. Parents in for graduation, kids looking for Father's Day presents, folks in athletic wear for a Nike track meet I had no clue about. I had a nice talk with another second-generation Minnesota potter (we both studied under students of Warren Mackenzie), met a real Minnesotan, from Duluth (and found myself falling back into my midwestern accent), and met the parents of college student regular patron of mine (he looks so much like his mom!). Saw two ferrets in a bubble backpack, taking turns looking out the window. And met this guy.

Never met him before, but we have fabric in common. About twenty years ago, I used this exact print to make a blouse for Denise. His was sewed by his sister, who is much better at matching patterns than I ever hope to be. Denise no longer fits her blouse and has thrifted it along, but still has this pair of drawstring shorts. And I've incorporated scraps into my pandemic quilt project, still incomplete.

Art gecko.

When I wasn't sorting, packing, shipping, emailing. Cycling down to UPS. Running out to get more boxes and packing peanuts?

Working on this new friend.

I have a new grand-niece. Tradition demands it.

New Off Center Ceramics t-shirt!
for a trunk sale

These are not for sale, sadly, just for us to wear to shows. I tried making and selling t-shirts, oh, twenty years ago. I kept having people stop in the booth, admire my work, and then say it was too fragile/heavy/bulky to take home with them. I was still at the Craft Center at the time, and had access to a silkscreen shop, so printed up t-shirts. Patterns were rooster and sleeping cat, in cobalt blue and brown ink, respectively, with colors added via fabric paint. Yellow beak and red wattles and comb on the rooster, yellow tiger stripes or brown siamese points on the cat. White shirts for the roosters, cream for the cats, in three sizes.

I sold exactly one shirt.

So we wore them at shows, gave them away as presents, eventually donated a bunch to Goodwill, just to get them out of my shed. And eventually, wore them out.

But I wanted our t-shirts to wear at shows. (Marketing 101, use your own stuff when you're out selling it.) Even if I'm not selling them, they're drawing attention to my ware, and the patterns I paint on them.
going to press

Enter Avery Inkjet Transfers. They're iron-on sheets that you can run through your inkjet printer, trim, and transfer to fabric. They make a bunch of different types and sizes, but I use the light-weight, 8.5x11". I did the original designs--rooster, cat, tree frog, bunnies--in ink on paper, colored with actual oxides and stains, then sprayed with fixative and scanned into the computer. I've since added two more patterns, octopus and hummingbird, originals done in ink and watercolor, and today released a third: my happy baby elephant. I can hardly wait for shows to start again, so we can take her out for a run.

Spent yesterday morning getting groceries, a two week supply. Lots of people in masks; some even wearing them correctly. People spacing themselves along the aisles, giving each other, if not six feet, at least as much space as was possible. The last time I was in, two weeks ago, they'd decommissioned the bulk food and spice bins, anything that required you to use a scoop or spoon, but still had the overhead, gravity pour units full. This time, those were gone, but the bins were filled with pre-bagged bulk food, so I came home with 3-4 lb. bags of lentils and pinto beans. They also had the 50 lb. bulk-source bags out, priced for individual sale, so I could've brought home a big bag of flour or Maya/Coba beans had I been inclined. Came home with 2-3 weeks worth of food, and found pretty much everything on my list except Garam Masala, which I didn't figure I'd get.

Yesterday afternoon was ironing. Ten strips of 1-2 inch segments is a lot of hems to iron flat. Afterward, I put a new blade on my rolling cutter and made triangles. By the time I'd finished, I had enough quarters for fifteen more 12-inch squares...

With one quarter left over.

Somewhere about three-fourths of the way through sewing paired quarters together, I ran out of thread on the bobbin, and realized I could already see the spool through the thread on top. (On my fourth spool of black thread, mind you.) Decided to refill the bobbin with navy blue, and ended up with just a little bit of black on the top spool when everything was finished stitching.

Once again, I'm draped with flags--fifteen more squares, on their way to ironing and trimming. In the end, I have 36 12-inch squares, more than enough to cover the entire bed. Since I don't have backing or batting fabric, and could really use a couple more spools of thread before I start putting the top together, I think I'm gonna call this project done for now, and go catch up on other stuff.

I'm really taking this quilt project way too seriously. This is the result of today's sewing; it's hard to tell because they're stacked up, but that's ten more strips of 30-36" each. Enough for at least a dozen more squares, probably more. I ran out of black thread again--my third spool--then found a fourth one hiding in my sewing kit, so I'm not reduced to random odd colors just yet. Though it may come to that. I also had to take the bobbin assembly apart and clean out fuzz this afternoon. Thread was getting snagged, underneath, but after the dis- and reassembly, it's sewing fine again.

Stiff neck and shoulders from too much sewing, though. Will put off ironing and cutting 'til tomorrow, probably sew squares Wednesday.

Well, it wasn't so bad after all. Those two more boxes of fabric.

Roughly half of what I found was not quilt-able. Old upholstery fabric, from re-covering a previous set of chairs, long since gone to Goodwill. (And the rubberized undercoat of the cloth long gone stiff and nasty.) A couple of kinds of fleece, from pseudo-sweater tops. A bag of pre-quilted fabric scrap, made into a winter jacket for Denise. Clothes to repair from so long ago that they no longer even fit.

Lots of trash, in other words.

By the time I finished sorting and ironing, I had the stack on the left. A busy morning measuring and cutting left me with the stacks of strips on the right. Still a little scrap fabric left over, but I think that's enough for now. Tomorrow, I'll do some sewing. And maybe boil and dye some eggs.

i wonder if popeil makes a quilt-o-metic?

I just found two more boxes of fabric scraps in the closet.

The bed spread, that is. That's... a lotta squares.
cats included for scale

I thought I'd do a little research on my sewing machine this morning. I really don't know that much about it, except that it's a sturdy little beast, and it's been getting a workout this last week.

Turns out my machine has a history that's about equal parts chicanery and innovation.

The history of the Nelco involves World War II and a man named Leon Jolson. A Jew, he was interned in a concentration camp in Germany, but because of his mechanical skills, he had more freedom of movement than most, and was able to escape and return to his wife. After the war, they moved to New York, where he began as a broker of sewing machine parts, and eventually got a license to import European sewing machines to the US.

He started the Nelco brand while working for Elna and Necchi sewing machine companies, the former a Swiss maker, the latter Italian. Sometime in the late 50s or early 60s, Japanese products were beginning to be accepted in the American market. He contacted a Japanese manufacturer (history is vague on which one) to have them make sewing machines to import. They were substantially cheaper than the European models, and apparently incorporated some of their innovations (without permission). As a result, Jolson eventually lost his distribution rights to Elna and Necchi, but by then Nelco was booming.
isn't she *beautiful?*

My best guess is that my machine dates to the 1960s. I bought it well-used in 1977 for $25 from the group home where my mother worked, and took it off to college. It's patched multitudes of blue jeans, sewed shop aprons and clothing, shopping bags and bears and hats in the nearly forty years since then, and has only been in the shop twice, once for a cracked bobbin assembly, and again for general tuning and adjusting. It's heavy and sturdy, and the only thing I miss is a free-arm for sewing sleeves and cuffs. The nifty little look-alike box is not actually a sewing kit, but a photo slide carrier that belonged to Denise's dad. (She now stores bookbinding supplies in it.)

The best part about this morning's historical deep dive is the postscript. At the end of the article, there was a video showing a machine almost identical to mine (except it has the fancy automatic four-step buttonhole option). Featuring a sewing-machine aficionado familiar to me.

That's singer-songwriter, bassist and Babes With Axes member TR Kelley.

Yesterday, I took Sunday's six lengths of sewn-together strips, ironed out all 18-dozen seams, and cut them into quarter-square triangles. I'd already completed five full squares, figured I could double that amount?

This is forty-eight triangles. Twelve more squares, for a total of 21, when I'm done.

Wow.

It's probably not the best way to attack a project that by its very nature is taken on just to fill up time and space, but I've been a production potter for too long. Organizing a system is second nature at this point. So, when I decided to convert all of my cotton fabric scraps into quilt squares, I started out systematically.

The first thing I did was bring in an extra wastebasket.

Then I started trimming out edges, skinny bits, anything narrower than an inch and a half or shorter than eight inches. I cut bigger chunks down to the eightish inch lengths, and ironed everything. The last time I did this, I just eyeballed the strips. This time, I got fussy.

I got out my cutting mat, a straight-edge and rolling cutter. Marked an eight-inch width, and ticked off marks at 1.5, 2 and 2.5 inches. Then slapped down pieces of scrap and started cutting strips. My ideal width was 2 inches, though I cut as narrow as 1.5 and as wide as 2.5. If the usable width was a little wider or narrower, I'd trim to keep as much as I could. The rest went in the basket, where Denise could choose what she wanted to pulp for paper and what to throw out.

You'll note that there's no color scheme here. I started sewing to make myself Hawaiian shirts. Conservative colors were never on the table. I blame my Slavic heritage--bright colored flowers on black background are my default. (Anything in the buff, gold or orange range was probably made for Denise. The blue background patterns are more-or-less split between us.)

Once I had enough strips of fabric cut, I started matching pairs, right sides together, 32 strips in all. Took them to the sewing machine and stitched all sixteen pairs along one edge, one after another (to save thread). I used a 1/4 inch seam allowance because I could conveniently line up on the edge of the presser foot. I'm using black thread, partly because it goes with any color, but mostly because I had two spools of it and figured I'd be less likely to run out.

After finishing the first pass, I cut the double strips apart, spread them out, and matched pairs again. Sew, cut, repeat. Eventually, I ended up with a strip about a yard long. Then started on the next set of 32.

What I love about working with such small (and short) pieces, is I don't even bother to pin them together. Line 'em up and surface tension/friction keep them in place as they zip through the machine.

At length, I was tired of sewing, so took my lengths to the ironing board and pressed the seams flat. (This is a pain in the butt, especially as they're so close together.)

Now it's back to the cutting board. I've made myself a template out of foam-core board (left over from a previous art project, natch), a right isosceles triangle 13 inches on the base, just over 6.5 inches high. I use the rolling cutter to cut out successive triangles, flipping over ever second one and using the previous edge, so get as many as possible out of each strip. The half-triangles left at either edge can be sewed onto the next set of strips. (Like I said, I got a system.)

At this point, I have to decide which edges will make the nicest match and put a pin in as a reminder. (Or just slap 'em together at random, like I did on all the previous steps.) I take them back to the sewing machine and stitch together sets of two, one after the other. (The result looks not unlike a string of prayer flags.) Clip, unfold, match and sew half-squares into squares, trying to keep all the pressed hems from flipping over. (It's not a big deal--it's a quilt, not formal wear--but I find myself getting fussy as the project continues.)

Once the squares are stitched, there's two more hems to press open, and the whole thing gets a good ironing. I finished five full squares in the first two days (so already double my previous total).

Today I went full production on the rest of the fabric strips; I think I have enough material to double that again.

Like anyone who's done a craft, ever, I have leftovers. Left over scraps of wood from carpentry projects, bits and bobs of paper from bookbinding, inks and paints and art pads from art projects. Molds, sprigs, stamps and partial bags of different clay bodies out in the studio. And fabric.

So much fabric.

I've never been a quilter, really. I don't have a closet full of Fat Quarters (quarter-yard pieces that the fabric store stocks by the thousands to ensnare the unwitting). My sewing tends toward clothing--shirts, blouses, slacks and shorts--and teddy bears. So my closet is full of tubs of fake fur, poly fill, and boxes with all the tangled bits and pieces of woven cotton fabric left from cutting out pattern pieces, the odd shaped bits that seemed potentially useful, or at least too big to throw away. Twenty years of scraps and remnants tend to build up after a while.

At one point, maybe a decade ago, I tried to put them to use. Cut them into strips, sewed them together, then cut out triangles that I further stitched into 12-inch squares. Figured with time, I'd eventually have enough to make a quilt or throw or comforter.

I managed to finish all of four, before getting side-tracked, most likely back into the pottery studio.

They've been in the bottom drawer of my dresser ever since, waiting for the moment I'd have time and energy to make more. And as I mentioned earlier, I'd just gone through the entire fabric closet recently, looking for larger scraps Denise could use for book cloth. So I figured what the heck, let's see if I can put my enforced leisure time to good use and clean up this mess. At the very least, I'll have more squares to put back in the drawer.

My second completed sewing project. Cotton fabric, elastic, and enough light-weight fusible interfacing to line the inner surfaces of the doubled cloth. Also a wire twist tie sewn into the top edge, to allow you to crimp it over the bridge of your nose (though I still get enough exhale sneaking past to fog my glasses). The dark red one is mine, the turquoise Denise's. I don't know how necessary they are, but I felt a little more protected when I had to visit the Post Office to ship some pots, and visit BiMart to pick up Denise's meds.
i dunno... but he left a silver bullet.

I have a tendency toward workaholism, especially where pottery is concerned. I'll start one project, and a week later I'm spending all hours in the studio, going through a hundred pounds (or more) of clay a day. So I've been rationing projects: sorting and packing pots one day, filling the recycling and washing clay towels the next. Boxing things to ship, catching up on email. I took my bike out to the UPS store yesterday, to ship off one package; holding off on a Post Office trip till we get another sunny afternoon to send out the next two orders. Maybe, by next week, I'll throw some pots again.

In the meantime, I'm catching up on my reading, watching Picard on a free trial month from CBS All Access, and doing some other creative projects. Here's the start of one:

Last month, when Denise and I went through the closet looking for fabric scraps she could turn into book cloth, we found an unused swath of spring-appropriate cloth, with buttons, that I'd never gotten around to making into a shirt for her. I also found enough interfacing scraps and contrast fabric for collar and cuffs, and a spool of appropriate-colored thread.

I've had the sewing machine for years; bought it secondhand from the group home where my mother worked when I went off to college in 1977. I initially used it for patching, but taught myself to sew from patterns when I couldn't find a Hawaiian shirt in my size back in, oh, 1983. Have made a lot of shirts, occasional slacks and shorts, lots of teddy bears since then. Sun hats--from a home-brew pattern, a vest, bathrobe, mumu (It was a very old pattern and fabric Denise had that her mother had never sewed up for her), several faux sweaters, even a few silky things for Valentines.

I hadn't used this particular pattern for a number of years (and sizes), but fortunately, it included multiple copies of the major pieces and I was able to tweak it to fit. I had just enough fabric to pull it off. I think it turned out pretty well. (Still needs buttons and button holes as of this photo.)

Thinking of some other projects to work on. JoAnn Fabrics has a link to a YouTube video showing how to sew face masks, and I think I have everything I need to make a pair. And there's been this quilt square project sitting in my bottom drawer for years now that I might finally get back to.

It's a bear! Of course, it's a bear. What do you expect in this family? In this case, it's a baby present for a potter from my studio who should be delivering any minute now...