And a very crappy Earth Day to you, too

OK, a little off topic, but there is a sewing connection. I popped into Ross this morning and happened across an adjustable drawer insert that would have been perfect for organizing one of the deep drawers in my sewing table (see? Told you there was a connection). There was no price on it, so I brought it up to the till, where the girl suggested it had broken off something else. It probably had been packaged with something, but nothing that was still on the shelf. "We'll have to throw it away," she said.

"Uh, if you're just going to throw it away, can I take it?"

"No; it's store policy."

Fine. I'm willing to pay for an item your store is going to bin, but you'd rather toss it in a landfill. Does anyone else find it offensive that "green" is being marketed as a responsible consumer principle—in essence so that we can clean up the messes left by a bunch of companies? Nothing you or I can change in our lifestyles would make a fraction of the difference that the Wal-Marts and other mega-evils of the world could make. Not to be too conspiracy-theory about it, but I do think that TV, magazines, and other media peddle stories on greening ourselves because 1) it's an easy, feel-good topic trumpeted by trend forecasters and eaten up by guilt-ridden yuppies, and 2) media is owned by big business, who stand to gain if consumers shoulder the responsibility for making the world a cleaner place.

Apologies for the tangent/tirade—the fact that today is Earth Day compelled me to post (the Other will be pleased I'm not just venting to him). And yes, I try to conserve resources wherever possible, I have no moral opposition to recycling, I prefer to buy secondhand, and I don't go out and dump chemicals into rivers while twiddling my mustachio (before a quick pop round to the railroad tracks to tie up a damsel); I just take a cynical view of big business.

EQ6 Tip: Simulate satin stitching

Satin-stitch appliqué once reigned supreme in the world of machine appliqué, but today it often loses out in favour of machine blanket stitching and invisible-thread mock hand applique. I'm hoping to post a gallery of satin-stitch appliqué from my growing collection of vintage craft books soon, but for now I thought I'd share how I simulate this under-appreciated stitch in EQ6.

One of the benefits of appliqué with a satin stitch (or even a fairly dense zigzag) is that the heavy bead of thread gives a definite boundary to the fabric shapes. This can work wonders when you're appliquéing lots of busy and/or large scale prints, which have a tendency to blend into each other.

EQ6 lets you adjust thread colours and styles on screen so you can audition different effects on your blocks before sewing. Though more likely designed to approximate heavier quilting threads, the heaviest weight can be used on the edges of appliqués to check the look of satin stitches. With the Set Thread tool chosen, make sure the color, style, and weight boxes are ticked. I like to use the solid-line style with the heaviest weight to simulate a satin stitch.

The Thread Library is programmed with the actual colour numbers (and usually names) for several brands of thread. Because computer monitors can't precisely duplicate thread colours (much less textures), I don't make actual thread decisions until I'm holding the actual thread against the actual fabric, but I like adding threads to a project's Sketchbook once I've bought them to keep track of what colour numbers I'm using for a particular quilt. In the design phase, I just pick colours willy-nilly, ignoring the brands and fiber types indicated in the software.

Anyway, here's how a sample block looks by default, which none of the threads messed about with:



The skinny black lines show patch edges. You can print with or without them, but they're just there for guidance. Clicking the Set Thread tool (using the settings shown in the screengrab above) on each of the black lines gives you this:

I used three different thread colours, each a shade or two darker than the patch it surrounds. This gives me a pretty good idea of how my lemon slice would look appliquéd with a satin stitch. (It can be hard to click exactly on the thin lines; usually clicking within the patch, near the edge, does the trick.)

But maybe I want to try a contrasting thread instead to define the shapes even further. I can test that out easily too:

Here I used the same settings with a black thread to give the appliqué a cartoony look.

This simulated satin stitching works best when you're zoomed in pretty far—the thread doesn't read very heavy if you have a whole queen-sized quilt on your worktable. I like to try out satin stitches on individual blocks instead.

As for simulating blanket stitching, I haven't a clue. But my machine won't sew a blanket stitch, so I can't say I'm really bothered.

More pegboard love

I've written previously about how much I love my pegboard, and the marvel of modern home organization continues to delight me as I tweak its configuration. Lately I've been doing a lot of fusible web appliqué as described in the excellent Stitched Raw Edge Appliqué, and I kept having to toss my roll of fusible web off the table to make cutting space—only to chase after the roll when I then needed another chunk of web. Now it's on the curtain rod hung from the bottom of my pegboard, so I just yank as much as I need onto the table, trace the template onto the paper side (which faces up as it comes off the roll), cut it out, and the roll stays put. And all my pencils and cutting tools are right there for trimming the template. In the book, Sue Nickels and Pat Holly recommend cutting the inside of the fusible templates out with embroidery scissors (essentially making a ring of webbing), but I find the X-Acto knife also stowed on my pegboard is quicker for removing the innards.

Serendipitous thrifting

The thrift stores in California have been good to us. In fact, some of our scores have been so perfect as to be creepy. See the tablecloth under the rest of our booty? Well, does it remind you of this tea towel from Berlin?

Felis Domesticus likes the tablecloth too, though you'd never know it from her usual grumpy expression.

An even better match to the tablecloth were these placemats that I found shortly after the tablecloth.

Really nice coarse linen, still in the original packaging! The only problem is that the label stickers leave some gummy residue—need to research how to get rid of it.

Nothing creepy about a well-matched set of linens, though. The scary bit is that while in Berlin I designed a quilt inspired by the the German tea towel that looks eerily similar to the tablecloth, which of course I hadn't yet laid eyes on.

These are just a couple of the blocks that I've been whizzing through the machine. Same basic colours and layout as the tablecloth, see? Did I peer into the future and design a quilt based on linens that had yet to find me? Bizarre. The only thing that seems to rival the number of pink and orange table linens we've found is the number of pink and orange quilting fabrics out there. It's a great colour combo, but who knew it was so prevalent?

Shop hops, guilds, and quilt shows

Over the last couple of months, I've been getting in touch with my quilting brethren (sistren?), taking advantage of having a car to investigate the wealth of quilting stuff going on around the area. I finally joined a guild, for starters, which has been good fun despite the demographic discrepancies between the other members and yours truly. The quilt show circuit is in high gear this weekend, with three shows to choose from within two hours, I hit a more local show a couple weeks ago, and last weekend was a big shop hop that sent the Other, Hortense, and me skittering across Northern California.

If nothing else, it was a good excuse to see towns we probably never would have passed through, but naturally fabric was the main draw. I'm finding that the shops with livelier staff tend to have livelier prints, which seems like it couldn't possibly be true—further investigation is in order. So here's the haul:

Now that I look at it, though, I notice that one of the best fabrics we found—another cityscape print—didn't make it into the mosaic. And fiddlesticks to that, since it would have filled that ugly white hole at the bottom. Anyway, the Other is becoming quite well trained and spotted the pink and orange prints for a machine-appliqué quilt I'm working on. The green and yellow fruity (ahem) fabrics were in fact purchased at his insistence, as all my yammering about fabric seems to have rubbed off on him. He actually begged for lessons on the sewing machine the other day! I would like to say that I'm thrilled to share my love of quilting with him, but instead I'm consumed with fear that he'll raid my stash. After all, as a guild member pointed out the other day, we don't buy fabric for us, we buy it so no one else can have it. So stay back, Other! Don't think I don't know the exact yardage of everything on my shelves! Don't think I can't sniff your greedy fingers rifling through the stacks! I'm watching you.