Organizing Fabric Remnants

Above, an excerpt from the 1952 book “Sewing Made Easy”, by Mary Lynch.

Over the weekend I did a bit of destashing of bins and bins of fabric remnants that I had let pile up in my craft shed and barn. I will be filling up my Suburban with the unloved fabric to donate to The Legacy in Sebastopol, one of my favorite shopping spots. Most of the fabric I saved is vintage and it desperately needed organizing.I like to roll and cigar-wrap my remnants, but rarely take the time to do that. On Sunday, I designed some wraps to print out to motivate me to get ’er done. And of course, I made them for you, too. For free PDF downloads of the wraps to print out, click HERE for the shorter ones and HERE for the longer ones. I will keep extra wraps on hand in my sewing nook to wrap remnants as I get them from now on.I cut along the margin edge of each sheet to remove the white non-printed section (so when the bands overlap, the image blends onto itself,) then cut between each graphic to make the strips.Before rolling my fabric, I measured each and wrote the dimensions on the label of the wrap.I placed a 12-inch piece of tape on the table as a folding guide so that all my rolls would be uniform in length. I folded each fabric piece to that width, folded back the raw edges and jelly-rolled, folding in the end raw edges before finishing the roll.I wrapped the roll with the band and secured with clear tape.I’ll be storing my remnants in vintage non-smelly luggage.

Small speech bubble117 Comments | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , ,
JSIM Post Divider

Birthday Party Placemats

Digging through some past art files, I came across birthday party placemats that I designed for my daughter, Jamie’s, 10th birthday bowling bash to use at the bowling alley a couple of years ago. I put a few games on one side and team logos to color in on the other. The team logos are modified designs found on istock.com.Using her guests’ and our family’s names, as well as other party related words, I created a word search. Of course, I did it the hard way, turns out, there’s plenty of free word search generators online if you do a simple Google search. I also made a few word scrambles, tic-tac-toe grids, and a find-the-matching-logos puzzle.I created the placemat files as 11″ x 17″ images, saved to a disk and had them printed in black and white at the copy shop. I also made answer sheets (which I layed out 4-up, printed and cut apart.)After a break from bowling, each partier found the placemats and colored pencils at the table and enjoyed them while waiting for the pizza. Everyone got a kick out of finding their own names in the puzzle.

To see more on the bowling party, including the fun t-shirts, click HERE!
Link

Small speech bubble4 Comments | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged
JSIM Post Divider

The White House Cookbook: Vintage Meat Cuts Images 1

I’m always flipping through old thrift store books for images. Sometimes our local library has wonderful book sales and there are some pretty cool oldies. I do my best to research the copyright expiration in hopes of confirming the work as public domain so that I can share the images for reproduction. Recently I came across this very grungy old cookbook found at the recycle area at the dump for a quarter. The White House Cookbook of 1887 by Mrs. Fanny Lemira Gillette.Barely clinging to its spine, it is tucked full of coupons, clippings, and handwritten recipes. Digging further, I found pressed flowers and clover. Clearly this was someone’s treasured homemaking sourcebook as well as their scrapbook. I have to keep it tied together with twine. In the front of the book are pages of information on cuts of meats with fabulous illustrations. If you’re a vegetarian, I’m sorry, I’m sure you won’t find this charming in the least. But I couldn’t help but think how wonderful these images would look on a bib apron.These would also be great printed to printable fabric sheets and appliquéd to a pillow for your kitchen seating area, or onto T-shirt transfer sheets and ironed on to muslin for making decorative dish towels. You can get a little crazy and embroider the image once you’ve transferred it. Or, print to paper and trim out to Mod Podge to canvases for kitchen decor, and so on.

Click to enlarge and save the scans of these book pages.The pages show through a bit from the other sides (which I don’t mind much at all,) and aside from hours of Photoshop work, that’s how they’ll remain for my versions, but I am also including a set of images that have been outlined in Adobe Illustrator as vector graphics that you can manipulate in your own software. Click on that image for a PDF download file.There’s much more than history and recipes in this book, so click HERE for more information on The White House Cookbook, or HERE to download your own PDF version of the entire book!

Small speech bubble38 Comments | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , ,
JSIM Post Divider