My Studio Is Drafty

Drafting table.  Drafty.  Get it?  Huh?  Huh?  -snort-

(Sorry for the mess, I’m still waiting for warmer weather so I can cover my banker boxes using spray glue… which means I haven’t really been jumping up to deal with the rest of the junk under the table either.)

Anyway, here's a little info on my pressing table, a.k.a. the Poor Neglected Drafting Table.  For many years I used it for both drawing and sewing. Once I started spending significantly more time sewing than drawing, I decided to convert it to a pressing table.  But I felt sort of guilty about it.  I mean, Poor Neglected Drafting Table and I go back, way back, and it seemed sort of heartless to just throw it over like that.  So I decided to make a cutting table that I could (sort of) easily convert back to a drawing table.  You know, in case I suddenly had the urge to, uh, draw something.  (I don't.  If you think I'm barely capable of completing something in the sewing arena with the Evil Monkeys on my back, you can well imagine my trying to do something that requires concentration... like drawing.  It's not gonna happen.)

The biggest feature of this project, then, was impermanence.

To that purpose, I decided that a piece of plywood 37.5" x 72" would be a totally and completely permanent fixture in any room I happened to be in.  Ain't no way that kind of weight would be moving under my power.  But what to do?  Cut it into two pieces of plywood, of course.  I can manage a 3'x3' piece of plywood moderately well.  I know this, because I fairly routinely have to take the outer covers off the boards to wash them.  CURSE YOU, EVIL HAIRY CAT OF, uh, EVILNESS.

But let's not jump ahead of ourselves.  To make this pressing table system you will need:

• a table

• 1/2" plywood, cut by your friendly hardware store employee to whatever shape and size is suitable, i.e. the size of your table (you might be able to substitute 1/4” masonite, if you can find any)

• wool blankets, preferably of the Army Surplus variety and a minimum content of 80% wool

• material for the outer cover, preferably something sturdy but with not a lot of texture (like duck or bull denim)

• staple gun (and staples)

• duct tape (because frankly, any project that doesn't require duct tape isn't a project I want to participate in and I'm sure you feel the same way.  Right?)

First cut your blankets the size of your board plus about 4"-5" extra width all the way around.  You should have two layers of wool if at all possible, so purchase accordingly.  For a 3'x3' board I got two layers out of one blanket.  Just.

Next, miter the corners (cut them) and then staple evenly around the entire width of the board.  This is just like canvas stretching, but requiring significantly less tension.  It just needs to be smooth and somewhat taut.

Once the wool layers are attached, cut your cover fabric slightly wider than the wool, but don't cut out the miters.  You just want a square. Otherwise it won't be washable and will fray and will generally be a total pain in the patootie to deal with.  Just sayin'.  I serged the edges of mine but I'll be honest, I only did this last night and I've had this particular set of covers for over a year and washed them several times already.  I just was lazy and never serged before. It's probably worth the extra five minutes of effort.

To attach the cover, I use Duct Tape: Tool Of Champions.  You could staple, but again that will make it really hard to take the covers off and wash them.  And you'll want to wash them a lot, trust me.  I had the idea last night that you could use a huge piece of elastic and make a snugged up cover that way, but really the duct tape works perfectly fine and is easy to replace.  So duct tape it is. Anyway, fold your corners into miters and tape everything down, pulling the fabric as evenly taut as possible.

The goal is to have a perfectly smooth, very taut cover on the top and no bumps on the bottom (so the board sits flatly on the table).  This can take some practice and (in my case, at least) much swearing and cursing.  But persevere, because you'll be happy once it's done. 

Once everything is taped up, voila!  Removable pressing table!

I couldn't work without this thing.  Despite the slight gap in the middle, it’s highly useful.  It presses like a dream and provides tons of cutting and laying-out space.   However, I should note that this is not a cheap sewing accessory.  The Alvin Workmaster 6' drafting table retails for $550. I got mine for significantly less (12 years ago), but $550 is the SRP.  Even at a discount, you're still looking at several hundred dollars.  Of course, you can use this system on any sturdy table (it has to be sturdy, however, because those plywood things are hea-vy).  Beyond the table expense, the 80% wool army blankets are pretty pricey as well.  Or they were when I bought them.  It used to be army blankets were dirt cheap, but either they're a lot more popular now or they're a lot harder to come by.  Regardless, they're not inexpensive when you need two or three.  Plus you have the cost of the plywood and of the cover fabric, which is probably the cheapest part of the whole thing.  Well, besides the duct tape, of course.

It is, however, TOTALLY WORTH IT.  Totally.

Schrunchable

cut rectangular strip

press, right side facing

chain piece, cut apart

press, wrong side facing

insert hair elastic

serge with rolled hem

quilting cotton

RPL knit

corduroy

dupioni

more quilting cotton

Scrunchies!

Many, many schrunchies.

You Need Another Tutorial, Right?

OK, so to answer two questions with one fell stroke:

I did sketch my mini-wardrobe line drawings by hand, scan them into a file and then alter them in Photoshop.  Normally, I would just use the online line drawings from the pattern company.   But in this case I was trying to put everything together while watching "Life On Mars" (yes Angie A., John Simm does love me) and I didn't want to drag out the laptop just to do my planning.  So instead, I sketched the garments I wanted to work with onto one sheet (this was handy for layout purposes anyway) and then I scanned the whole thing in later when I was ready to mess with color.

So in thinking about that, I decided I would waste a bunch of blogging energy by writing a tutorial.  Yay, tutorial!  My thoughts are that this will be totally old hat for some of you, totally boring for others and maybe helpful for a handful.  Yay, handful! There are lots of online and magazine resources for a billion different ways to do wardrobe storyboards, so if you're interested you might do a search and see what you can see.  However, here's my two cents.  My really really long-winded two cents (yes Angie A., I'm talking to you again).  This process looks way more complicated than it actually is, so if you haven't ever tried it, give it a chance.  It's fun!

I would normally do this (and I did do this) with Adobe Photoshop.  However, Photoshop isn't accessible to everyone.  But Lo!  There is a free-ware photo editing software from Microsoft called Paint.net.  As far as I can tell, this is a like a scaled-down version of Photoshop.  It's also freeware, which I can guarantee you Photoshop is not. And holy Hare Krishnas, have you seen Adobe's latest prices??  Oops.  I probably shouldn’t say that.   I work for an Adobe Service Provider and I'm the Adobe Girl. 

Awesome.  Now I'm imagining being made out of wet clay.

So anyway, I'm going to do this tutorial with Paint.net which should be interesting since I've never used it before... this should at least tell us if it is actually "like Photoshop but easier".  

If you're not interested, now would be the time to bail.

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HOW TO MAKE A COMPUTER GENERATED WARDROBE STORYBOARD USING PAINT.NET (for absolute rank beginners)

Don't panic if it looks difficult, it's not.  Just follow the steps closely.  It takes way longer to read this all than it actually does to do the work.

STEP ONE - Getting your line drawing:

Find a line drawing of your garment.  You can either copy-and-save the image from an online source, scan from the pattern envelope or hand trace a hard copy. If you hand trace, you have to have the ability to scan in your drawing to create an image file (for instance, a nice happy .JPEG).  I found this line drawing at the Burda Fashion website and right-mouse clicked to save the image.

 

Next I opened up Paint.net and used the "open" menu command to open the drawing (by going to File>Open...).  The file you're creating is called a "drawing" (not to be confused with the "drawing" of your garment). 

In your workspace you will find several palettes (these are the boxes with tools or pieces of information relating to your drawing). 

STEP TWO - Making Your Cut-Out, Part 1

Basically we want to make a cut-out of your garment so you can add color to only the inside  of the line drawing and not the background.

Go to the Toolbar palette, which is the long skinny palette on the left with lots of icons in it.  These are what you use to select, move, color and do lots of other things.  For our purposes, we want to select the white background of the line drawing.  "Selecting" means that only whatever is highlighted blue can be altered (for instance only that area will be painted or copied).  Click on the fourth tool in the left-hand column, which is called the "magic wand" tool (if you hold the mouse over the tools without clicking a pop-up will show you what the tool is called).  The magic wand tool selects based on similarity of pixel color.  In other words, it tries to find everything adjacent to the place where you click that is relatively similar to what you clicked on.

Using the magic wand tool, click on the white background of the line drawing.  This should select everything that's white on the background of the line drawing.  If you've selected something you didn't  want, you can go to Edit>Deselect (or Control+D key command) and unselect everything.

To add to your selection, you can also use a keyboard command.  So for instance in this example there's a white space above the neckline that didn't get selected when I clicked the first time.  To add this area, hold down the Control key.  Notice how the magic wand pointer changes to include a little plus sign. That means you can click again and add to your current selection.

(Side note: if you're new to this whole process, this system works best with a high-contrast line drawing like the sample.  If your image has a lot of gradient detail or lots of gray area, using this tool is more complicated.  I would still use it but I'd have to mess with it a bit.  High-contrast black-and-white line drawings should select well because you mostly only have white or black. 

Also note, if your line drawing has gaps in the black lines, the tool will bleed through that gap and select part of the image inside the garment.  You can close up these gaps by using the drawing tool with black selected.  If you're scanning your own drawings, be sure to keep this in mind and close up any gaps before you scan it.)

When you're satisfied with what you've selected we can move on to the second step of making the cut-out.  Be sure your selection stays selected throughout the next steps.  If you accidentally lose your selection, go back and reselect or go to Edit>Undo until your selection shows up again.

STEP THREE - Making Your Cut-Out, Part 2

Now we need to get the area inside the dress selected and not the area outside the dress.  Go to Edit>Invert Selection.  This causes everything you don’t have selected to be selected and vice versa.  Now the shape of the dress and everything inside is selected.  You now have a cut-out of your garment.

STEP FOUR -Making Layers:

At the bottom right corner is a palette called "Layers".  Think of layers as pieces of transparent acetate. You can color or draw on each new layer, stack it up on top of other layers (in whatever order you like) and make complex images.  Just like your teacher used to do in 6th grade with the overhead projector, only better. 

When you opened your image, that became the "background" layer.  Next you need to create a New Layer by clicking on the "Add New Layer" button at the bottom right corner of the Layout palette.  See?  A brand spanking new layer with nothing in it called "Layer 2".  You can change the name of the layer if you want to but it's not necessary.

Those grey and white checkers mean it's transparent.  This second (and any additional) layer is where you'll be adding your color to test out what fabrics you want to use. 

STEP FIVE - The Really Fun Part (a.k.a. Adding Color)

To begin with, don't get overly concerned with what color you use.  Just pick any color. You can change this later.

Be sure you still have Layer 2 active in the Layers palette.  You want to do this next step in the empty layer and not on your line drawing layer.

Go to the Tool palette and select the Paintbucket tool (this looks like, amazingly enough, a little bucket of paint).  At the bottom left you should have a color wheel.  Click anywhere in this to select the color you want.  When you have your color chosen, click in the middle of the dress shape with the Paintbucket pointer to fill the whole selected area with a solid color.  You should end up with a block of color that is dress-shaped.

 

STEP SIX - Show The Drawing Lines:

In this last step, you want to make the line drawing under the color block show up again.  Make sure you continue to have Layer 2 selected in the Layer palette.  Now go to the menu bar and select Layers>Layer Properties... and in the dialog box under "Blending Mode" selected "Multiply".

To describe it easily, this setting causes the layer to visually merge with the layer below it.  You're "multiplying" the pixels of both layers.  You should be able to see your line drawing and the color you chose.

Now you can fill the Layer 2 cut-out with any color you want.  Use the Paintbucket tool, choose your color and be sure to click inside the previous color in order to fill that shape. If you click outside the previous color, you'll fill the background.

If you want to try multiple variations, use "Edit> Save As..." to save a new file for each change and you'll have a new image for each color.

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And there you have it, the fast-and-dirty way to make some storyboard images.

No really.  That's fast and dirty.  Seriously.

You can do it!

Now go forth and create some storyboards for us to admire.

 

(disclaimer: I take absolutely no responsibility for the accuracy or coherence of this tutorial.  Use at your own risk.  If your computer blows up or your brain melts, that is completely and utterly your own fault.  Really.  On the other hand, if this works out amazingly well for you, I am brilliant and you must send me presents.)

Back-and-forth

Ok, so I decided to make a tutorial about the “back-and-forth” pleats I showed in my last post.  Camera in hand, I pulled out a scrap of fabric, full of good intentions and cheerful optimism.

Now I know why I had made a firm resolution to never do tutorials.  Oh man.  The lack of coherency.  The weird pictures.  The “WTF?” of it all.  And all for a tutorial that no one is likely to read.

And then I thought to myself , “This will totally allow you to avoid taking down the Christmas tree and/or interacting with your miserable family for several hours… not to mention all the pattern-fitting that can be shoved under the sewing table.” 

A tutorial it is!

I’m calling these Back-and-Forth Tucks.  Well actually Katie is calling them that and I’m stealing it.  Gwensews says she’s heard them called “Mexican Tucks”, which when I Googled it came up with one hit from the now-defunct Creative Needle magazine.  I liked that magazine and was sorry it so precipitously went under, because they tended to have heirloom sewing techniques without the insane over-the-top weirdness that Sew Beautiful seems to go in for all too often.  It also means I can’t look up anything about tucks on their now equally defunct  website.  So, we’re going with B-N-F Tucks.

Step One:  Mark and stitch your pleats as normal.

Use whatever tucks or pleats your pattern calls for.  This method works on any type of pleats, but as you’ll see in a minute, it looks best on tucks/pleats that are set close together and are narrow.

Step Two: Start stitching the Back-and-Forth part

Start at the top of the pleats or wherever you want your b-n-f to begin.  Lower the needle into the stitching of the first pleat and then stitch across to the fold of the last pleat.  Be sure you have a tail of bobbin and needle thread on both sides when you start so you can tie a knot at the back.   Pull the threads to the back and tie off each row as you finish so that the stitches don’t pull out when you move on to the next row.  Here’s the back of the first row (sorry for the blurriness).

Step Three: The Next Back-and-Forth

Press or hold pleats in the opposite direction and stitch next row.  You’ll find that there’s a point of least resistance for where to place your second row of stitches.  The wider your pleat, the further apart your rows will need to be or the fabric surrounding your pleats will warp like crazy.

Keep working until you reach the end of your pleats or to where you want to stop.

You can see some of the warping on the surrounding fabric in this shot.  Here’s a set with narrower pleats:

The far right and far left rows are 1/2” and 1/4” tucks.  The center row shows actual 1/8” pintucks.  Pintucks work best for this technique because they’re so narrow.  However, in this example I placed the tucks quite far apart and there is a lot of “blank” fabric space in between.  This shows up the b-n-f stitching a lot.  If you don’t like this look, you can do this method in a different way that looks really cool with pintucks.  However, it requires hand-stitching.

Supplimental Steps: Handstitch the Back-and-Forth Tucks

To start, knot your thread and bring it up from the back and through the fold of the tuck.  Then take a tiny “bite” of fabric next to the tuck and tighten the stitch.  Take three or four more tiny bites in the same spot  (being sure to catch different threads of the fabric or you will make a hole in it).

Here are some finished rows with machine stitching,  hand tacks (in contrasting color—in a matching color they don’t show up much), hand tacks with a seed pearl attached and, at the end, french knots in 6 strands of embroidery floss.

The french knots are worked exactly the same as the tucks, coming up through the center of the fold and then down through the fabric next to the tuck.  These are really pretty and delicate and would be totally cute on a baby dress.  Or a grown-up dress, for that matter.

 

And that’s my tutorial.  Sorry if it’s not exactly coherent.  My miserable family figured out where I’m hiding and now they’re demanding food.  Sheesh.  So needy.

A Brief Interlude

Today, Gentle Reader (I like to maintain the fantasy that I have Readers), today we will have a short break, an intermission, a pause, a hiatus, an idyll if you will.

Yes, I own a thesaurus. What's it to you?

Where was I? Oh yes, we are proceeding with what I will henceforth call The Great Uniform Interregnum. Otherwise known as "I'm going to write about something else because I'm a little bit tired of uniforms and also I made a dress for my younger daughter (The Little One) and it was a total disaster, but I realized that I have a tip to share with everyone about coverstitch binder feet". Or something like that.

Binder Feet. They suck.

Oooo, that should have been the title of this post. Too late. However, it's a totally true statement. Binder feet do suck, with a suckiness that knows no bounds. There is little in the sewing world I loathe more than binder feet. I base this hatred on cold, hard experience.

I just did a mental reckoning and I have no less than five binder feet, not a one of which works properly. (A wise reader such as yourself might, at this point, be wondering why I continued to buy binder feet after the first two -or even four- didn't work. This, Gentle Reader, is a damned good question.)

I have two binder foot attachments for my sewing machine (which is a Brother, in case you're wondering) and three, count them THREE, for my coverstitch machine (which is a Janome). Fortunately, being the Queen of Cheap, I bought generic feet for my coverstitch machine on eBay, so instead of the hundreds of dollars I could have spent on brand-name feet I only spent about $45 on all three feet total. I guess wasting $45 is better than wasting $450.

(And before you accuse me of being merely inept with binder feet, Gentle Reader, I would like to state for the record that I am, under normal circumstances, a mechanically-inclined type of person. I deal with recalcitrant industrial printing equipment all day, for Pete's sake, and that doesn't cause nearly half the trouble as those evil little binder feet cause.)

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I have completely (completely) given up using any of these stinking feet. Er... no pun intended. Instead, I do a what-seems-like-it-should-take-longer-than-using-a-binder-foot-but-isn't-when-you-factor-in-time-wasted-on-evil-binder-foot-setup process that is multi-stepped but works perfectly every time.

I thought I'd share.

Step Being the First:

Cut out your binding strip as you usually would. You can do this technique using either a raw-finish or clean-finish strip. My example shows a clean finish.

Step Being the Second:

Your seam width should be wherever the fold of the strip is meant to be (in other words, if you intend to do a clean-finish binding and your finished width is 1/2" -you have a 2" strip- set your seam width to 1/2"). Using a BASTING STITCH, attach the strip to the garment, right sides together. You will be removing all basting stitches when completed.


Step Being the Third:

Press the strip towards the seam allowance, so that the right side of the strip is showing.


Turn over the entire garment so that the right side is on the table. Now fold the raw edge of the strip into the center to meet the center of the strip. Press heavily.


Step Being the Fourth:

Fold the strip again so that the edge of the garment is wrapped (in otherwords, it looks like binding).


At this point, the fabric I'm using will determine if or how much I pin the strip in place. In this case I pinned all the way around the entire edge because I was using jersey knit as my binding and it tended to curl a lot. In other cases I might skip the pinning.


Step Being the Fifth:

Using a basting stitch, stitch through all layers down the middle of the binding strip. Be sure to stitch in a place where your final stitching won't overlap, so it's easy to remove the basting.


Remove the pins. You should now have a completely bound edge basted in place.

Step Being the Last:

Once everything's in place and tacked down, you can take it over to the coverstitch machine (or if you're using a double or single needle on your sewing machine) and stitch it down permanently. The nice thing is you don't really have to adjust anything, you just line up the presser foot so the stitches run down the center of the binding.

When the permanent stitches are in, be sure to remove BOTH basted seams. This will release the edge of the binding so it looks "normal".

(this is a slightly bad example, as my coverstitch machine chose this moment to start skipping stitches)

In conclusion: The only difference between a garment using the traditional binder foot and a garment using this method will be the utter lack of eye-popping, face-reddening, blood-pressure-raising stress on the creator of the second garment. Yes, it does require several more steps than the binder foot method and on paper looks like it will take much more time. This idea fails to take into consideration all the facts, however. You can write it as an equation:

T + F(n) = R

R is the result, where T is time spent, F is frustration trying to get $#*@!* thing to work and n is the incremental increase of F relative to the increase of T, caused by having to adjust and readjust and re-readjust and generally mess with the binder foot eighty times to get it to work correctly.

Using this equation, there is just no rational excuse to use a binder foot. The math says it all.