I was very busy last night stitching on my Dog Pound Pals blocks now that I’ve decided to make the switch to batiks. I love appliquing with batiks – the fabrics behave so nicely and none of those little hairy wisps of threads constantly needing to be tucked under.
Here’s Toby
and here’s Speck.
This afternoon I’ll spend some time taping together patterns and tracing pieces and then the fun part of choosing fabrics. Of course choosing fabrics is also very messy business – at least if you’re me. Piles of batiks all over the place I’ve been pawing (bad pun) through.
One of these days I need to do some online shopping – I can’t get my favorite applique needles locally and need to do a restock. And just who keeps stealing all my pins??? LOL I was going to pin the binding down on a quilt and I was looking at my sad little pincushion. I’m very picky about pins and needles now that I found some I really love. And, I think I see a Amazon order in my not too distant future since I need to restock a couple other sewing room necessities.
Do you have specific things your sewing room shouldn’t be without but they have to be a specific brand. Whether it’s clothing, food or sewing things – brand does not normally matter to me. I generally prefer the store brand of many foods; clothes – I hate clothes shopping and designer labels only mean higher prices so I don’t care about them – there are only a handful of things I buy where it must be a specific brand (and those are mostly food items).
But, there are a few items in m y sewing room where brand matters: Applique needles – I do use several kinds simply because I have a good stockpile of them before I hit upon the ones I really love. And the ones I love, I can’t get locally and I keep forgetting to order more.
Jeana Kimball’s Foxglove Cottage Straw Needles – these are my favorites (not that you asked but you know you would have been wondering) 🙂 A friend sent me one of the sample packs of different sizes years ago and I fell in love with these – especially for batik fabrics since they are so thin and move more easily through the densely woven fabric.
Pins — it’s got to be Clover Patchwork – Fine Pins (aqua and yellow balls on the tops of them). They are nice and fine and hold applique in place without taking too much of a “bite” out of the fabric which may throw off placement or getting it to lay flat. The only problem with them – they are nice and thin and sometimes I use them to pin things like multiple layers of freezer paper to cut templates and they bend. So many of them do end up in the trash due to that, but I love those pins.
Best Press – yes I know you can make your own spray starch and I did for many years but I love Best Press better.
505 Spray and Fix – fabric adhesive spray and the only one I use after much testing against other brands. If I’m working on wall hangings, table runners or other smaller projects (I don’t use it for large quilts) I will spray baste layers rather than pinning and this doesn’t have the strong odor that may of the others I tried did and it doesn’t gum up my sewing machine needle ( other brands I tried claimed they wouldn’t gum it up but did anyway).
Now you know what my favorite sewing room notions are – whether you wanted to or not. Now to get busy – I’m starving, laundry needs to be tossed in, and there are more pattern pieces to trace and I just might have to start my list of what I need to order at Amazon. 🙂
So DPPAS participants – how are you coming on your blocks. Are you caught up through April? Fallen behind a month or more? Haven’t started yet? I think I already approved some photos of the May blocks of people who had worked ahead or are really speedy.
Justquiltin with Denise Russart 