amethyst73 | Sewing stuff! (Reply)

Hi everyone! I know I’ve been a little quiet with regards to what I’ve been sewing recently. It’s not that I haven’t been doing anything - quite the opposite - but I wanted to keep things private, so that Certain People wouldn’t see their designs in advance.

The main thing I’ve been doing so far is tote bags. I figured that at least around here, everyone can use a tote bag: disposable plastic bags are now illegal in parts of California, and you have to pay for a recyclable paper bag. The solution? Bring your own!

The part that’s both fun and difficult is figuring out just what to put on tote bags for different people, though. I knew I wanted to make a bag for

ladybird97 as a hostess gift for when we went to stay with her in November, for example. She spends some of her free time writing games that take place in a universe that runs using Call of Cthulhu rules. Without a lot of hope, I googled ‘cthulhu embroidery pattern’ and found, much to my surprise, that there were a lot of designs out there! Most of them were for hand-embroidery or cross-stitch, several of which were sampler-type patterns centered around the text “May Cthulhu eat this house last.” I also found a couple of great Cthulhu patterns from a site that’s become my absolute favorite place to go to for machine embroidery patterns, Urban Threads. (They sell hand embroidery patterns too if that’s your specialty!) So… This ended up being the front of the bag:
Cthulhu front

ladybird97 is also a medievalist scholar, so there’s a Latin inscription on the back. Guess what it says?

Cthulhu back

(I didn’t design the fancy C; I bought that as part of an alphabet over at etsy. Thanks to

orichalcum for providing the Latin!)

Once I had both pieces of embroidery done, I sewed the fabric up into a tote bag. The first bag was done!

One of the other friends we were staying with is a big fan of fantasy and science fiction literature. It was a little harder figuring out what to put on his bag, but after poking around the Dragons section of Urban Threads, I found this:

The dragon went on the front of a bag for another set of friends we were also going to be staying with. I would have liked to find something related to music for them, but the various sites I looked at had designs that were either rather generic or cute but inappropriate (cats playing jazz instruments). So they got a dragon bag, since they were also fond of good fantasy literature.

I’ve got other bags in the works, but I’ll post photos of them after the holidays.

The other thing I’ve done recently is a tuffet. You may ask: What’s a tuffet? Why a tuffet? Isn’t a tuffet a silly thing to have around in a house of five cats?

A tuffet, it turns out, is basically a fancy footstool, except without legs. In this case, it’s a foam cylinder, 14” across and 12” high, with a decorative quilted cover.

Why a tuffet? Well, when I bought my sewing machine at Eddie’s Quilting Bee, I got three years’ access to a class series called the Millenium Embroidery Club. I hadn’t been to one of these classes yet and wanted to see what was involved, so I signed up. It turned out that the project for the month of November was… a tuffet??? What the heck was I going to do with a tuffet?!? A cotton-covered soft object, particularly with dressy embroidery on top, wasn’t going to last a week in our small, cat-filled house!

Fortunately, a coworker mentioned looking into ottomans, and I asked if she’d be willing to take a tuffet instead. She was agreeable, so I had her pick out an embroidery pattern from the patterns that came in my sewing machine and give me an idea of the fabrics she wanted.

Top

Top of the tuffet

Prior to class, I cut out the strips of fabric and stitched out the embroidery, knowing that big embroidery patterns can take a while. Knowing what I know now, I’d change some of the colors around, but overall it came out basically okay.

In class, we quilted the fabric together, which is something I’d never done before. I learned several things about quilting in that class, not least of which is that you’d better have your fleece and your bottom fabric at least as big as your top fabric, otherwise your initial quilting seam is going to show after everything’s sewn together. I also learned that quilting is pretty fun, and plan to look into it more at some point in the future.

Tuffet bottom

Completed tuffet

Some of the other students were sewing out pretty impressive things. One woman, who’d been quilting for years but was new to embroidery, stitched out this tiger from her machine’s inventory, on fabric that I covet.

Another student was about my age and was just a little newer to her machine than I was to mine (we had the same model, even). I think she hadn’t yet done a really large embroidery pattern, because she spent pretty much all of class stitching out this adorable owl: