A Post About Shapes!

Today I made something round and something square. 

My husband has had these end tables that were passed down to him from his grandparents forever.  They're nice and solid, but they just aren't my style, and I've been begging him for a very long time to get rid of them.  Well, we finally found some friends who wanted to buy them off us, so as an additional "thank you", I offered to make them the baked good of their choice, and they chose chocolate chip cookies (or as I prefer to say, chip chocolate cookies). Oddly enough, I don't have a recipe for chip chocolate cookies in my repertoire, but lo and behold, Trader Joe's printed one on the bag of chocolate chips I bought!  When I've made chip chocolate cookies in the past with other recipes, I've had problems with spreading and crunchiness and whatnot.  These. were. perfection.  I'm almost sad to give them away. And then I look at those tables.  Almost.

So in case you didn't figure it out yet, the cookies were my something round.  For my square project, I tackled...napkins!

I've been slowly creating a sewing library, and one of the books I picked up is Stitch by Stitch: Learning to Sew, One Project at a Time, by Deborah Moebes.  The first part of the book goes over the basics, like tools and your machine and fabric choices. The second part is the projects, each one building on the one before it, so by the end, you're sewing clothing.  The first project is Fancy Napkins, so I decided to tackle those.

I picked up 1 1/4 yards of quilting cotton at Joann and washed, dried, and ironed it.  The author then has me "true up" my fabric.  Now, I'm by no means an experienced sewer, but I'm not completely new either, and I have never heard of truing up fabric.  I wanted to do the project correctly, and learn the proper skills, so I followed the directions for truing up my fabric.  Hands down, this was the most tedious and awful thing I've ever had to do.  She offers two options: one for teasing out a thread along the selvedge to establish the grainline, the other, snip and rip. She recommends the first option, as it is gentler, and I went with it because I was scared to rip my fabric.  45 minutes later, I had about three inches of thread teased out, and I decided that was enough and lined it up with my new Omnigrid ruler and cut it with my new rotary cutter. It didn't look any straighter than before I trued it up, but I trusted her and proceeded on to step two: cutting out four 19" squares.  NO ONE TOLD ME HOW HARD IT IS TO CUT EVEN SQUARES.  The directions for this didn't help either.  Her suggestions were "measure out four sides, mark with chalk and cut", or "measure out two sides, fold into a triangle, and cut off the excess".  No directions on making sure your sides all match.  And this is where the truing up didn't seem to help, because after meticulously measuring 19" for each side, none of my squares came out even or to 19".  Fortunately, they're just napkins, but still, this is a basic skill that I'd like to master before tackling anything else.  The next step was to overstitch all the edges to keep them from unraveling. Easy enough.

Then, on to mitering the corners. Also fairly easy.  After pressing the corners and edges, I topstitched the edges and gave them another ironing. Et voila!

The best-looking miter of the bunch.

Embarrassingly, I had to Google how to set a table.

I think once I master the cutting part, this project will go much faster (sounds like another lesson with Mums!). I also think the miters will be neater with more even cuts.  I have another fabric waiting in the wings to make another set. Practice makes perfect!

Also, I realize that I haven't posted any pictures of my beautiful machine!  Here she is:

She is, as yet, nameless, so I am open to suggestions!