"Business" Card Holders

First, let's be clear about one thing: I don't have business cards; I have retirement cards.

I am soon going to a mini-reunion with some dear friends from school many moons ago. I decided to make a gift for each of my friends. This time the gift will be "business" card holders.

I used some fabric from a Kaffe Fassett collection. I just love his bright, cheerful designs. I found the directions here: Directions for Business Card Holder

The directions were good, but I still had to work at it to get it to come out well. I had to make several trips to various stores to find the right kind of hairbands, the fusible fleece, and the buttons.

I made a lot of mistakes on my prototype. It probably took around five hours what with all the ripping out of stitches. It took me a lot of time to figure out what combinations of fabric to use for each holder, what color thread, what color buttons, etc.

I wanted to use my machine's monogramming stitch (I have a Janome Memory Craft 6500). This added a level of complexity.  After some trial and error I figured out using a tear-away stabilizer would help.

I had to make sure the monogramming would contrast sufficiently with the fabric. I'm not sure I always succeeded with that.

I also had to measure carefully to figure out where to place the monogramming. I first used a scrap of a quilt sandwich to practice the monogramming. Surprisingly, the dimensions of the monogrammed lines were different on the quilt sandwich than on the unquilted card pocket pieces. More ripping out.
Eventually I got them centered, but half of them are probably not fully centered.

I really liked the fusible fleece. It is really more like a batting than a fleece. It fuses very easily and smoothly. I wonder if I could use it on a larger quilt project?

I had a few sewing machine disasters along the way. Something happened with my bobbin case and it got chewed up a little, but I got it working again. Also, at one point a pin fell into the feed dogs and while I was trying to fish it out it went all the way in. Apparently no harm, no foul.

Once I got to the point where the pieces were assembled and turned inside out, I had a lot of trouble with the top-stitching. Then I remembered my trusty old walking foot. It worked like a dream.

When I finally produced a decent result I decided to take an assembly-line approach for the rest. This project had so many changes of thread and feet and stitches, and stitch lengths that it really did save a lot of time to do it in this fashion.

I am pretty happy with the end result:

Phew! The card fits!

They are all different!

Lessons Learned:

Multiply the time estimated for the project by at least three.
Add three extra trips to the store.
Make a practice piece before you waste materials.
Use a light fabric where you plan to monogram.
Remember the walking foot!

Mug Rug Hugs

I am continuing to cannibalize The Secret Garden. This time I am using it to make mug rugs for some dear friends I will be seeing in January. The entire project was made using leftovers and scraps. I didn't even have to buy the thread.

Here is where I started:

Rocky Mountain Four-Patch Chain block from The Secret Garden.

I ripped out a few seams in this block to remove the four corner squares, which were the perfect size for mug rugs. I then sewed the four cross-pieces together in pairs to make two more squares, and I had the makings of 6 mug rugs.

This project turned out to be a big learning process for me (that's a good thing). I didn't have any directions to follow, so I had to wing it, using what I had learned from other projects. I did a lot of ripping out, but in the end, I let some imperfections go. It was hard to do, but I kept telling myself:

1. Nobody will notice
2. Nobody will care
3. I am being too much of a perfectionist
4. I have already spent way too much time on this
5. Why do they have to be perfect anyway?

I used my machine's monogramming capability. It doesn't look as nice as the results you get from a machine with a true embroidery feature, but I wanted a machine that is designed primarily for quilting. I only had to rip out half a monogram. I guess I learned something from my earlier attempts to make labels. It occurred to me, after the fact, that stabilizer might be a good way to go here.

For the actual quilting I tried some straight line quilting, parallel to the "ditch" lines, about 1/4" out. It looked terrible on the back (the side with the monogramming) because it crossed over the monogramming.

Next I tried a stippling or meandering pattern for the free-motion quilting. After doing three I decided I really didn't like the way it looked. In the end I went with a loopy pattern. I have not used this before, but I liked the way it looked. Instead of quilting it from the pieced side, I quilted from the monogrammed side, making sure not to quilt over the monogram.

Loopy quilting

The backing fabric is left over from from some yardage I bought to use in the piecing on the front. The coral backing fabric appears on the patchwork front of some of the pieces. A black companion fabric appears on the front of other pieces. I really like this fabric. The black was provided in the original BOM kits, and I was excited when I found the same 
print in coral.
 
For the binding, I was going to do it the easy way - attach to the back and machine-sew on the front, close to the edge. This looked terrible with white thread. I didn't want to try it with coral thread in the bobbin because I had been experiencing tension problems all through this project and I thought it would look really bad with two different colors if the tension was even the tiniest bit off. 

So, I just sewed the front of the binding down by hand. The white thread shows up too much for my taste, but at the end of a project I always have less patience for ripping out. If I had thought about it, I would have machine-sewn the binding onto the front and hand-sewn it on the back, perhaps using coral thread.

And here they are! I will be making a total of 8.

Lessons learned:

• Use a stabilizer when monogramming. (I did not.)
• Don't quilt through monogramming.
• Thread should match binding. 
• Take tiny stitches when hand-sewing the binding.
• Think carefully about whether to attach the binding to front or back, especially if you change your mind about method. 
• It's harder to do free-motion quilting on a tiny piece than on a fairly large piece.