We Make Things

We are having a crafty weekend at the Torres house … My husband constructed a lightbox for me (more on that later), my six-year old son Eli had to decorate his Valentine mailbox for school, and I am working on baby shower gifts.

Above you see the “For Kicks” patchwork ball from Anna Maria Horner’s Seams to Me.  This is actually the second ball that I made from this pattern. I have a ton of friends and family that are expecting, so I will be making many more of these as shower gifts in the coming months!    Over the past few weeks, I have been cutting and marking fabric pieces whenever I find myself sitting still for a few minutes at a time. Then when I have a baby shower approaching, I sit down at the sewing machine and they come together in just a few hours.

I am not an experienced seamstress, so here are a few tricks that have helped make these balls easy and reasonably quick to pull together:

1.  Definitely practice the piecing technique before you begin on a “real” ball.  It is a tad tricky, but after a few tries it clicked, and after that I found it pretty easy to manage .  (Anna Maria recommends practicing the technique first in the book, and it is good advice – don’t ignore it!)
2.  My poor geometry-challenged brain kept getting “hexagon” and “pentagon” mixed up as I went through the instructions.  So right away I highlighted every instance of the word “hexagon” with one color and “pentagon” with another color– that way I didn’t mix up the two shapes.  I just knew that as I saw a blue highlighted word, that I was supposed to use the hexagons … it helped a ton!
3.  I SUCK at eyeballing seam allowances– especially if the shape is other than perfectly straight or square.  So, I used a fabric pen to put a tiny dot in each corner of my cut-out shapes to indicate where each seam would begin and end.  This saved me a lot of grief when sewing the ball together.
4.  I also apparently suck at the blind stitch that she recommends using to finish the last seams after stuffing the ball.  I attempted it with the first ball I made, but wasn’t really thrilled with the results.  The second time around I used invisible thread and did tiny running stitches to close the last few seams.  It turned out much neater, and there was substantially less yelling and swearing involved.  I will have to practice the blind stitch more before trying it again on a real project.

Overall the project is fun and simple.  Both moms-to-be have been excited about the balls, so I will keep crankin’ them out for the rest of the babies that are coming in 2009!