Project Two - Success!

Well, I've had this vision in my head of a blanket I wanted to make for awhile now, but I wasn't willing to do all the embroidery by hand. There was a piece on Etsy of an airplane with just the loop line behind it that stuck in my head.  I don't really have much space left on my walls for more art, so I wanted to do this instead.

I found a big piece of fleece on sale and it turned out to be the perfect size! 2 yards of 60" wide fabric makes a perfect blanket to curl up in on cooler nights.  I had this plan of cleaning Sunday night, but the piece of fleece thrown over my chair was taunting me....

So instead of cleaning, I decided to make my first attempt at overlock stitching and see if I could make the blanket I could see in my head.  I spent a good bit of time reading the manual to my machine and it looked pretty simple.  I called Mom and asked if I could really just overlock stitch the edge of fleece and leave it.  She said yes, so I went for it.

Trying to deal with the giant piece of fleece was...interesting....

I think I might need a bigger sewing table if I'm going to keep doing things like this! (Or at least somewhere else to put things like the manual, so I'm not pushing them to the side while doing the sewing part.  OK - perhaps just some organizational skills would probably do the trick, but we're pretending.

I had the tension a little too tight (still getting the hang of that part...) and it made this awesome, slightly scalloped edge that I ended up loving.

It looks a little better on the large scale, but then you could see the dog toys shredded all over my floor!

I made a paper airplane and laid it out so I could see what the outline would look like. I drew it out on paper and messed with it until I liked the look

I really had intended to stop there for the night and clean up those shredded dog toys, but I was having so much fun I couldn't stop myself!  .  Then I killed the blade of my rotary cutter cutting around the template - silly me.

I had some white cotton I had grabbed for this purpose, though I hadn't really thought I'd use it so soon.  I laid my template on top of the fabric and held it down with the ruler while I cut around it.  I tried pinning it, but it made it hard to keep the ruler in place and made the fabric buckle a little too much.  It worked in the end, but it involved a fair amount of cursing and impatience on my part!

Then I had a paper version and a fabric version. Hooray!  I tried to rub the pencil lines onto the fabric, which was a total failure, so I just drew them on with a mechanical pencil and ran a straight stitch in black over them.  It worked perfectly. :)

I think I did pretty well!  The tip of the plane came out a little curved, but I actually liked that in the end.  It made it look more like it was flying somehow.

I should have cut allowance to fold under the edges, but of course I didn't think of that until after I had gotten to this point. (Oops! Rookie mistake!) I decided to just go with it.

Once I had the plane cut, I needed to mark the line to sew in it's path on the blanket.  I laid the whole thing out on my bed and used some white chalk to mark the line I wanted to sew.  It sorta worked, I guess.  Let's say it worked enough to do the sewing, but not so much that I would do it again.  I need a better method to mark the line on fleece!  Once I'd drawn in the line, I placed the airplane and stood back to make sure it looked like I wanted it to.

(Please ignore the total disaster that is my house right now. I pulled everything out to organize it and it's not going well!)

I brought it back to the machine and got completely tangled up in the fleece trying to find the starting point of the line.  The puppy thought this was hilarious and tried to make off with the blanket while I was fighting with it.  (Thanks, Casey.) 

I used a zigzag stitch 7mm across and made it fairly close together. I will confess the beginning of the line is a little funky, because I was messing with how close together the zigzag was.  In the end, however, I got it right and it went pretty smoothly.  I even used my machine on the high speed setting for the first time! I felt magic.  And there were only a few moment when I panicked because I couldn't find the line too.

Once the line was done, I placed the plane and basted it down with dark thread.  I used the white thread to applique around the edge. (Can I just mention that I LOVE my new sewing machine?!)

And then it was done!

And there we go - my second fully successful project.  In fact, so successful one of my friends has asked me to make him a more manly version for his couch.  Since my dog steals his blanket every time we come over, I think that seems only fair!  I guess that gives me a chance to remember things like folded edges on the applique too.  I am scheming presents for more people already....

But anyway, hooray success!
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