Cajun Corner – Vol.
6, No. 9 – March 30, 2014
Bon
Jour! Welcome to Cajun
Stitchery’s weekly email and welcome to our family.
ΘΘΘΘΘ
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Spring is in the air. George and I have a bad case of spring
fever. George is busy taking apart our
old garden raised bed and making new ones.
I’m busy potting anything that I think might grow. We are totally in love with our columbine
flowers and want the yard full of them.
They are absolutely beautiful.
Now is the time to be amazed at the plants that lived through winter and
looked like they were dead as a door nail.
All of a sudden they are alive, again.
However, our giant lemon tree isn’t showing any signs of life. I guess we’ll give it a few more weeks to see
if it starts to come back. Luckily, I
saved the seeds from the last lemon.
Maybe they will grow. The
beautiful blackberry flowers are everywhere.
Looks like we might have some blackberry cobbler in a few weeks. Yum!
On the sewing/embroidery side, I have been
teaching myself to make baby booties. To
be so small, they are a little bit of a challenge. I’ve made enough of them now where I have the
method down. My problem is making the
toe/front of the little booties curve properly.
The whole bootie adventure began with me wanting
to use up some scrap fabric. I have bags
and bags of scrap fabric that I simply cannot seem to be able to toss. So, I started looking for projects to use up
the scrap. When I hit onto baby booties,
I got stuck. There is reasoning behind
my obsessive/compulsive bootie behavior.
Way back when I began Cajun Stitchery, I touted that customers could
come to me for gifts for any occasion. A
lady contacted me about a baby shower. At the time I had nothing for her. I was embarrassed and determined that will
never happen again. It won’t. I have lots of baby tee shirts and bibs. I want to add baby booties to these
accessories. So far the booties take
about 3 or 4 hours to make. To be able
to price the booties would make them more expensive than anyone that I know
would be willing to pay. I’m still
working on that.
At that point in the bootie escapade, I needed to
create a way to cut down on time.
Cutting out patterns is not one of my favorite things to do in the
sewing process. On top of that, the
booties are so tiny and I, of course, want to embroider on them. It would be much easier to embroider on the
booties before cutting them out so I can hoop a larger piece of fabric. It dawned on me that I could combine the
cutting and the embroidery into one step.
I scanned in the bootie pattern pieces and digitized them to fit into
one hooping. There was a lot of trial
and error. Now that it is all digitized,
I can include the embroidery design in the same hooping. When cutting the fabric it helps to have the
cutting outline directly on the fabric.
The tissue paper pattern always seems to move around on me. There’s more.
Since I have the boring needle on Clothilde, the machine outlines the
pattern, then embroiders the design, and yes, then cuts it out. Woot!
Woot! There was one more thing
that I decided could be combined with this step. Two pattern pieces required an inner fabric
to be placed between the bootie fabric and lining and is simply stitched onto
the back of these 2 bootie pieces. I
included that step, as well. After the
embroidery machine, the only thing to do is tear off the stabilizer and sew the
pieces together. A bonus to this method
is that the fabric pieces are cut out with precision, including the little
right/left, front/back notches. On the
other hand, it is easier to do this with larger pieces of fabric, rather than
scrap.
We can now embroider on all pieces of the bootie,
including the sole. Think about it. The child’s monogram could be embroidered
onto the front/toe of the bootie, and the date of birth on the sole of the
bootie. Voila! A keepsake.
Wouldn’t that make a terrific gift?
Still the booties take awhile to make and are
very expensive. My thought process was
to perhaps add baby accessories that are not so time consuming so the price of
the 2 or 3 items together would make a nice gift and not be too expensive since
it is more than one item. A matching
baby bib would be nice; especially, one our new heirloom-like, scallop edged
bibs with the baby’s monogram in the middle.
Then I thought of a bonnet. I do have a bonnet pattern and they are
pretty easy to make. I took out the
pattern pieces and they are just too big to fit in a hoop, or even to
scan. So, I began doing some research on
the internet. I do think we will be able
to accomplish the bonnet in the hoop. I
just need to give it more thought.
We’ve come a long way with the baby accessories,
but wait! I still have bags and bags of
scrap. Oh well, that’s for another day.
HAVE A GREAT WEEK
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Thank you, Bob, for all of the jokes:
A cop pulled me over the other day for speeding. After giving me the ticket, he teases me a bit about my out of state plate and the fact that I'm driving a car that's in my Dad's name. He points to my dash and asks, "Is that a radar detector I see?" I said "I don't know it's my Dad's car. It's just always been there, but it does let me know every time I pass a Krispy Kreme." He smirked and said, "Good one. Now slow down."
She was admired for her sweetness and kindness to all. One afternoon the pastor came to call on her and she showed him into her quaint sitting room. She invited him to have a seat while she prepared tea. As he sat facing her old
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