Feeling watched

From 2 fox blocks in 6 hours last weekend, the cookie sheet of piles of cut fabric pieces

turned into 13 more foxes on Friday, bringing me to 15. All those eyes, looking up at me…

Someone asked me whether Mr. MmmYarn wore only blue-and-white shirts. No, he had variety. But these are the shirts I kept, mainly because they are 100% cotton.  

Making multiples at once was such an efficient process that I cut 10 more sets of shirt fabric on Friday evening and used it up, bringing the count to 25 complete foxes by this morning. My piece alignment continues to improve, although challenged by using fabric from many-times-washed shirts, which is a bit warped. Gripe: cutting is so time-consuming! I cut tall piles of green, white, and navy eye/nose fabric last week and have gone through it all. [Uh, let’s see… 14 x 25 = 350 pieces so far, not counting the discards. Yeah, that’s a lot of cutting.]

The biggest assembly efficiency is continuous chain piecing: chaining until I have some 10 pieces hanging off the back of the machine, cutting off the last 9 and pressing as needed, then continuing to chain until all straight lines are sewn (you also waste far less thread chaining than sewing them one at a time). Chaining doesn’t work for the diagonals on my machine, but I learned I can lift the foot to pull a completed diagonal back an inch-and-a-half, and as long as I lift the needle to the point where the top and bottom threads are completely separate, I can stick in the next diagonal, saving thread and aggravation. The separation is important; slightly crossed threads jam my machine each time because they get caught on the point of the diagonal.

My quilting friend recommended I use “a fairy” to start at edges. Maybe it’s spelled “ferry” because it’s ferrying your project fabric’s edge under the presser foot. You stitch on a scrap of fabric for just a few stitches, at its edge closest to you, and then you chain piece it to your project fabric. I learned in October to stitch an inch on a scrap at the start of every machine sewing session just to verify everything is threaded and tensioned correctly; it didn’t occur to me to keep going with the scrap.

Those sly 2 foxes are actually piles of 5 blocks each

This afternoon, I assembled the pockets for the Casey Skirt (using the scrap fabric trick so my stitches could start right at the edge; bliss!) and began hand catchstitching the interfacing to the inner waistband so I can maybe finish that tomorrow. And I snuck in another hat as knitting relief throughout all this cutting and sewing. Busy, busy. Fortunately, no one is watching what else is (not) going on around here because there were compromises. The laundry is done, plants watered, and bills paid; the floors and other areas may be wanting attention. Ahem.

Watchful snowy egret, about to nab a fish