What a character (a tiny tutorial)

During the past few weeks I have had a little run of writing blog posts employing characters not found on my Australian computer keyboard. On the first occasion it was an innocuous pound currency symbol (£). Then yesterday I needed to add two letters e with acute accents (for Récupération Nathalie Brault).

In my travels I noticed that Bellgirl was also looking for a c with a cedilla (ç). If you too are searching for that special character (alpha-numeric, not human) here is a quick and easy trick for PC users*.

Look up the four digit number of the character here. Then hold down the Alt key on your keyboard and type the number (including the zero) using the numeric keypad. Once you release the Alt key, your character will appear.

Use this to create all sorts of nice characters on your blog: from fractions (¼ ½ ¾) to copyright and trademark symbols (© ® ™) to currency symbols (€ ¢ ¥) to various accented characters (ú õ ÿ) to a host of other cool stuff (‰ ¶ ÷ • º ‡). You are not restricted to using this this keyboard trick for your blog - it will generally work in other applications too.

* As I'm not a Mac user, I'm not sure how you might do the equivalent. Any comments with instructions are most welcome!

Tutorial - Make a shower cap

Its time to unleash on an unsuspecting public, my shower cap tutorial. If you follow the link there is both an online and a downloadable PDF version. I've laboured over this a bit. Its a long time since I've had to write anything vaguely sensible.

If you make a shower cap, I'd love to see what you come up with. Suggestions for improvements to this tutorial are most welcome. Especially if my instructions produce a knitted tea cosy.

Happy bearday

Here is a little collaborative project that I worked on with Argy and Bargy. Its our first homemade birthday card.

I did the folding, drawing, cutting and initial gluing. They did all the sprinkling of the chopped up yarn onto the glue ... as well as various locations around the house.

If you recognise the colour of the yarn, then the answer is yes: I have recklessly hacked into the ball that I am also using to try and crochet the granny square. Something always has to suffer for the art.

To make a similar fluffy bear card:

1. Print and trace this guy onto medium-weight cardstock
   
2. Cut up your yarn into small pieces - lots of them ... unless you prefer a bit of a threadbare teddy
   
3. Apply a thick layer of craft glue to the bear in strategic places
4. Sprinkle the yarn all over the bear, then shake off the excess
   If you are aged between 1 and 3 years, remember to spread what is left over around the house
5. Gently press the wool fur down, so that the glue bonds
6. Allow to dry before patting!

Love is blind

Blind hem stitch, that is.

I have finally arrived at the end of the Velvet Butterick 3597. Its been a marathon project (a two hour skirt which has taken a month) and I hope not to mention much about it again! All I have left is the hem, which I am stitching by hand using a blind hem stitch.

If you haven't used this stitch before, its an absolute beauty. A stitch with gratifying, magical properties, much like ladder stitch. I have gently eased back a little of the hem here, loosening the stitching, to show how it looks.

I'm not the world's best hand-stitcher by any means, but this clever stitch hems a garment almost invisibly. Indeed on this velvet skirt, I can confidently say that the hem is completely invisible. The pile of the fabric is quite deep, so you don't see any stitching on the outside. I think this is the only thing that has gone smoothly through this whole project! (You can catch previous disasters here, here and here!).

This is how I have blind hem stitched ...

Usually you turn up the hem and press. In this case, I've overlocked the bottom of the hem and just pinned it without pressing. I am leaving all pressing to a dry cleaner when I finish, due to a previous ironing accident! I have used a single thread (to help ensure the stitching is not seen) and secured it in a seam on the garment. I've then taken the needle, crossed to the inside of the hem allowance and taken a small stitch.

Next I have passed the needle diagonally back towards the garment. I have taken a tiny stitch, picking up just two or three threads.

From there I have continued on - the next stitch in the hem, the following one in the garment and so forth. Zig zag back and forth until you are finished. Most literature about blind hem stitch recommends that you over-stitch in the hem allowance every now and then, to ensure that you don't later lose the whole lot, if one part comes undone.

And at the end of all your work, et voila! A beautiful hem.
Now all I need to do is find a dry cleaner who I trust to press this garment ...

A covert fastener

In the two days since attending the zipper course, I have had good intentions about practising what I learned. Use it or lose it. Given that I had an unfinished cushion cover sitting on my sewing table, tonight seemed the perfect time to practise something snazzy like the concealed zipper.

I do love the name concealed zipper. It sounds all covert and dangerous. I can just imagine the movie scene now ...

Ma'am ... drop the pinking shears and put your hands in the air.

Quick cuff her and check for any concealed zippers.

Hmmm ... I digress ... back to sewing ...

If you haven't tried one of these babies out before, there are a few things you need to know before starting. The concealed zip is added before sewing the rest of the seam. You need a zipper that is marked as an "invisible" or "concealed" zipper. It will have the teeth running on the underside of the zip (the flip side to the zipper pull). For machine sewing, you also need a specific concealed zipper foot.

Anyway, here's what I did.

The first step was to attach the zipper to the right-hand seam allowance. My right-hand seam allowance belonged to the back of the cushion (red fabric). After opening the zipper fully, I placed the right sides of the zipper and fabric together, aligning the zip in the seam allowance. (I suffer from some spatial awareness issues, so this step took me quite a long time.) I then pinned and basted.

Using the special sewing machine foot, I then sewed the length of the zip from top to bottom. The zip teeth travel through the left-hand channel on the underside the foot. The needle needs to stitch very, very close to the teeth, so I rolled these outwards so that the needle could stitch in as close as possible. I stopped when I hit the zipper pull at the bottom!

The next step was to attach the zipper to the left-hand seam allowance. This was the front of the cushion, which is in the Daisies fabric. I placed the right sides of the zipper and fabric together, aligning the zip in the seam allowance. I pinned and basted again.

Again, using the concealed zipper machine foot, I sewed the length of the zip from top to bottom. This time the zipper teeth travelled through the right-hand channel on the underside of the foot. I rolled the teeth out again, so that I could stitch in really close to the coiled teeth.

Finally I removed the basting and sewed up the remainder of the seam (to the left and right of the zip) using the regular machine foot. I also added a little hand stitch at the bottom of the zip to secure the seam. Voila! The zipper is indeed quite concealed in the seam.