sewing notions – 3and3quarters

May 15th: My Top 7 Most Useful Tools & Notions

Hello!

I hope you’re all having a lovely Sunday!

So I had a great request from one of you guys a few days ago to share with you a few of the notions and tools that I find to be the most useful when I’m sewing and quilting. A few of them I have shared before, but if you’re new to these parts, I hope you find the following helpful!

First off are these two awesome little tools from Clover.

Both of these I find super useful when I’m paper-piecing. I use the Serrated Tracing Wheel to perforate the lines on the paper before sewing over them. Doing this also helps to tear the paper away from the seams and fabrics at the end. The other tool is called a Finger Presser and I use this to quickly press the seams open all throughout the construction of a paper-pieced block instead of using the iron. For me, it saves so much time on going back and forth to the ironing board and also saves my poor little fingers from getting burnt! Ouchies!

Next up is another Clover product called a Hera Marker.

As strange and weird as it looks, this little tool is so awesome and very useful to use for us quilters. Because I mainly incorporate straight lines all throughout my quilting, I use a Hera Marker and a long quilting ruler to mark out clear, even lines onto the quilt top that I then simply sew over, achieving a (almost) straight quilted line!

Since using this tool, I’ve seen a huge improvement in my quilting! Everything just looks so more consistent and pro-fesh, sky-rocketing my confidence by a mile!

The next two things I like to see as more everyday-type useful tools.

The Fiskars thread snips would have to be one of the best little scissors I’ve ever used! They cut through thread like butter and have a little tapered like point that elevates the blade away from the surface of the fabric but is still able to make the closest of cuts when trimming away thread! It really is like magic!

Ahh, the seam ripper. Where would we be without one! And just like all of the other Clover products, this one doesn’t disappoint! It’s light and easy to hold and rips through the toughest of mistakes like it’s no bodies business! It’s a fab little tool and I know I can rely on it to fix some of the worst mistakes I can ever dream of making!

This is my tape measure…

I have it sitting on my desk and I would say that I reach for it at least five times during one day! Whether that be for answering your questions, figuring out size scales for patterns and blocks as well as playing with it when I’m bored or procrastinating! My nephews also love playing with it too! 😀

I particularly find this one useful as it has centimetres on one side and inches on the other. Because I use both of these types of measurements in my quilting, it’s so helpful to turn to it and quickly figure out what 5″ is in centimetres! (It’s about 12.5cm if you’re curious!) 😀 The tape measure is also super long, measuring up to 120″ (300cm) which is helpful when figuring out how much batting and backing fabric one needs to finish a quilt!

And last of all is a tin of basting pins.

I don’t usually baste my quilts with pins but when I do I find these ones super helpful! This is because they have a slight bend to them almost acting like a hook as you pierce them through the three layers of the quilt. They close nice and quickly and also undo almost instantly as you’re quilting along on your machine. This particular set of pins I bought from Spotlight and are by a Australian haberdashery company called Birch.

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So there are just a few of my top tools and notions that first came to mind to share with you!

In tomorrows post I’ll go through a few more that didn’t quite make the top seven! 🙂

Do you have any top fave tools and notions that you find useful when your sewing and quilting? Let me know!

Happy Sewing, Friends!!

#instagramjunkie

So over the past day or so I’ve been overloading my instagram feed with a whole bunch of quick pics of tools I use (and could not function without) within my sewing room.

#takealook

To see them all together check out my Flickr page!

Happy Sewing! xx

A New Sewing Space

Last week was moving week. All of my sewing stuff – my big sewing table included – was shipped, hauled and moved into another room in our house. Previously it was mum’s ‘office’ for when she worked fulltime as a primary teacher. And previous to that it was my older brothers room before he moved out.

But now, it’s mine!

It took a good four days to get everything just the way I wanted: two to move everything and another two to sort everything out!

Being the diligent-and-ever-so-organised-OCD-person that I am, I first made a to-scale plan-o-gram of the room with to-scale cutouts of the furniture that needed to be in the room. Here I was able to swap, shift and move stuff so that the dimensions of the room would work for the intended outcome – to sew!! (And to study…)

I ensured I had sufficient room for a design wall so I could see the layout of my quilts coming together, that the power-point was in easy reach and could be accessed by the iron as well as making sure enough light could flow into the room for both sewing and studying purposes!

And here it is!