I’m a massive fan of sewing gadgets — things you never knew you needed until you get them into your craft room. Miniature darners? Hem markers? Loop turners? Yes, yes and yes. The only problem is that the UK market seems to lag a bit behind in gratuitous gadgets, probably because everything is so expensive here the Brits can’t afford to be as gung-ho about New Shiny Things as Americans.

But now I’ve discovered Sew-Quick, importer of foreign sewing shinies to the UK! In the finest tradition of UK online shops, Sew-Quick is practically undetectable by Google search. I only stumbled across it while looking for a Perfect Pleater (curse you, Wearing History!). My jaw slowly lowered as I clicked through their product list. Snapsetters! PerfectFuse, stay tape, Steam-a-Seam! Mini vacuums for cleaning your machine! Individual issues of Threads! And a panoply of the delightful little gadgets collectively known as notions.

Fiskars 12-in-1 sewing tool, for when you need to Macgyver that hem

Sew-Quick are located in Scotland and emphasize their customer service and shipping speed — I’ll be interested to see how they stack up against other domestic sewing supply businesses, some of which take several days to dispatch and/or backorder items for weeks without telling you. Warning: Do not compare Sew-Quick’s prices with what Americans are paying.

Another place to waste an hour and £50 is Shibori Dragon, a US online shop that specializes in Japanese sewing and tailoring supplies. Superfine pins (they make ordinary pins feel like nails) and the satisfyingly precise Chakoner marker are available, as are Omnigrip rulers and, oh dear, a whole bunch of Japanese fabrics, threads, quilting kits, stencils and more.

Just won the lottery or looking for somewhere to spend the kids’ inheritance? The Thimble Society sells exquisite antique thimbles, pincushions, needle cases, sewing sets and more. They would probably recoil in horror if you announced you planned to actually use them.

Rabbit pincushion, only £480

If you really want to lose yourself to lust, try Googling “sewing chatelaines”. A chatelaine was an early, feminine version of the Swiss army knife — a metal clasp that attached to a woman’s belt and from which she could hang small, useful items such as thimble cases, scissors, needle and thread holders, bodkins, memorandum books, spectacle cases etc. They started in the middle ages as utilitarian objects, but quickly became decorative. Some could be stunning, like these 18th and 19th-century chatelaines from the V&A:

Complete antique chatelaines sell on eBay for anything up to £1200. You can assemble your own modern-day chatelaine for slightly less from LACIS, Treasured Finds, Buckaroo Bobbins or Simply Scissors.

Where do you go for your favorite shinies?

Looking back, I feel like I spent much of my childhood wrestling with shoddy tools. Probably the worst culprits were left-handed school scissors. Other southpaws may remember them: sticky-hinged, rusty, blunt-bladed and with handles that bit into your knuckles. They were so abysmal I eventually gave up and learned to cut right-handed. They also taught me the absolute futility of common ownership of tools. To this day, hands off my Ginghers if you know what’s good for you.

I fell in love with good tools the first time I ever used a properly sharpened chef’s knife, the kind you only have to stroke over the skin of a tomato for it to part like tearing silk. Using it instantly transformed meal preparation from drudgery into flow — a state of pleasurable absorption in which time no longer mattered. I wonder how many people think they don’t like cooking merely because most of their time in the kitchen is spent fighting against blunt knives, flimsy pans and dead stove sparkers.

Similarly, I spent my first couple of years as a home seamstress thinking I had no natural ability because I found it fiendishly difficult to achieve passable results even on seemingly simple projects. It was only later that I discovered many of my difficulties were due in large part to substandard tools — cheap plastic sewing machines, blunt shears, the wrong size needles, flimsy thread. Once I upgraded to good-quality tools, these difficulties vanished. (Which was a relief, but also meant I now had only my own ineptitude to blame when things went wrong.)

The Frister and Rossman Destiny, tool of the devil.

Sewing has a lot in common with cooking in that it requires specialized tools which might only get used a few times a year but for which there are no effective substitutes. A meal in the making can grind to a halt for lack of a grater or roasting pan; a beautiful dress can wind up in the Pile of Shame for lack of silk pins or a bias tape maker. I think this puts a lot of would-be sewers off, and I must admit that equipping a sewing room can hoover up a lot of money and time. But those of us who are even semi-serious about making our own food don’t scruple to equip our kitchens with electric mixers and turkey basters and citrus zesters, so why should we bridle at the idea of tailor’s hams, loop turners or pinking shears?

On the bright side, the tool-intensive nature of sewing gives it an element of magpie glee. You can always make an excuse to stop into a craft shop because there is always going to be something useful in there, usually at the pleasantly justifiable cost of £10 or less. Utilitarian shinies: the best of both worlds.

There are as many sewing setups as there are people who sew. I thought I’d give you a peek into mine. Here’s my sewing room, aka Atelier Catbox. Theoretically, this was meant to be a joint project room, but my sewing and I have almost completely annexed it. (Sorry, James! You snooze, you lose!) I probably should have prettied it up before taking the photo, but this at least gives you an accurate idea of what it looks like after I’ve finished a project: yes, like a cyclone hit it. Craft Rooms it’s not, but it is a happy mess.

Click through for the annoted image.

And here are some of the tools I use.

Measuring and cutting

Top to bottom: PatternMaster, Sew Easy French curve and quilter's ruler; rotary cutter, pinking shears, Gingher dressmaking shears, thread clipper, snips; sewing gauges. And measuring tape, obviously.

I mostly cut out garment pieces with shears on my living room floor, saving the rotary cutter for straight edges or small pieces, because it’s tedious trying to cut out anything larger than the cutting mat with a rotary cutter — you have to shift the mat underneath fabric and pattern, which invariably rucks everything up. The 24-inch quilters’ ruler is very useful, as it’s gridded and includes angle guides for cutting on the true bias, but I suspect it’s not 100% accurate. The Sew-Easy French curve I can’t honestly recommend for drafting — the edges feel like they’ve been hacked out with a handsaw. The PatternMaster is more useful and accurate, and comes in metric and imperial. The Fiskars snips (with gray and black handle) are excellent for clipping curves and snipping notches into seam allowances.

Pressing

Foreground to background: Sleeve board with cotton lawn and silk organza press cloths; tailor's ham; point presser/clapper; travel iron for small surfaces; spray bottle; iron with Teflon plate; feline assistant.

Pressing is a huge part of sewing, which is ironic (see what I did there?) because I have always avoided it whenever possible. I have a lot of pressing equipment, and I have to admit, grudgingly, that it makes all the difference. Sleeve boards and tailor’s hams are the kind of thing many sewers put off buying, but they are extremely useful for achieving better finish on garments. A tailor’s ham, for instance, can cure the Pointy Nipple Syndrome caused by bust darts. The spray bottle is for pressing linen or wetting press cloths; I don’t use steam from the iron very often as it’s hard to control. When I do, I fill my iron with bottled water because London tap water is so hard it can bork an iron completely within 6 months, turning it into a spluttering, limescale-spitting demon.

Marking

At left: Clover tracing wheel for use with carbon paper. Top to bottom: Hera, fine-point water-soluble marker, Chakoner chalk wheel, Sewline erasable marking pencil.

Different projects require different marking tools. The Chakoner chalk marker is probably one of the most useful sewing gadgets I own. About the same size as tailor’s chalk but much more accurate, it’s heart-shaped, refillable and fits easily in the hand, drawing a very fine line of powdered chalk using a rotating wheel. The chalk brushes off (usually). The Sewline pencil is a close second to the Chakoner; it handles like a mechanical pencil and the marks can be erased either with the eraser or with plain water.

Sewing

Bernina 830 in Horn cabinet, found on eBay. Cabinet open, sewing machine in operating position.

Cabinet closed, sewing machine lowered and stowed.

My knees literally went weak when I found this on eBay after eight months of waiting. The machine was a classic model I knew and loved, refurbished to near-mint condition. The cabinet had an airlift to raise and lower the machine, a custom insert for flatbed sewing and innumerable trays and drawers for notions. When I won the auction for just over half my maximum bid, I ran up and down the flat squealing. When the buildings across the road caught fire and we had to evacuate the house, it was harder to leave the Bernina than to leave the cat. It is my baby. (Sorry, Audrey.)

Some favorite gadgets:

Wrist pincushion

Why do I feel instantly more competent when I put this on? Who cares. No more groping for pins at a crucial moment. Constantly useful.

Scissors onna chain

Where are my scissors? James, did you take my scissors? I just had them. Goddammit, you put something down for one second in this house and… I already looked there. Are you sitting on them? Where the hell are they? Now I’m going to have to get off the couch and — oh, here they are. On this chain around my neck.

Fine point tweezers and seam ripper

Needle-nose tweezers. Good for pulling every last stray thread out of that seam you screwed up and had to unpick.

Vintage Singer hem marker

Menfolk like to pretend they don’t know how to use pins. If you haven’t got a reliable sewing buddy, here’s a good way to mark your hems accurately yourself. Adjust the red thingy to desired hem height on ruler, hold rubber bulb in hand, stand in front of marker and turn slowly in a complete circle, squeezing at intervals. The red thingy will puff a line of powdered chalk all the way around your skirt to mark your hemline. Sorted. (Avoid the Dritz/Prym hem marker as it is worse than useless.)

Simflex expandable gauge

If, like me, you are crap at getting buttonholes, tucks and pleats evenly spaced, you need one of these. It expands like an accordion to allow perfectly even marking. Watch out for pinched fingers.

The humble thimble

When I slip this on and pick up my needle, I feel like I’m taking my place among the billions of women, most of them nameless, who have stitched their way through the course of human history. Thimbles are sturdy, practical and utterly feminine. There are worse things to be.

Tell me about your tools!

If I were a millionaire and weren’t on the ration, I would be all over these. As it is, I’ll have to content myself with ruining your budget.

Darning socks, like many other things it’s much nicer to have done for you than to do yourself, is shrouded in unwarranted romanticism. The equation of sock-darning with feminine nurture was so sentimentally ingrained in western culture for so long that as late as 1967, Luis Buñuel could still use holey socks as cinematic shorthand for “motherless man-child” in Belle de Jour . The romance of darning conveniently obscures the fact that, as anyone who’s attempted it will have discovered, it’s classic women’s work — fiddly, prosaic and time-consuming.

Darning only makes sense in an economy where a pair of socks is worth more than the time it takes to mend them. In the late 1940s, after the privations of war began to ease — and, more importantly, after women had had a taste of earning decent wages for their work — a lot of wives, mothers, daughters and girlfriends must have found it hard to return to darning other people’s socks for nothing. That, presumably, is one reason why the Speedweve was invented.

I stumbled across this little gizmo from the ’40s on eBay and was instantly charmed by it. The Speedweve darner, “Lancashire’s smallest loom”, has all the hallmarks of the “as seen on TV” invention — a domestic gadget dreamed up in a garden shed by somebody hoping it would make his fortune. It even got a mention in Popular Science.

Darning, as Zoe’s post illustrates, is basically just filling in a hole by using a needle and thread to weave a small patch in the fabric. This can be a very slow and imperfect process, as well as being hard on the eyes if you’re using fine threads or darning black on black. The Speedweve works as a miniature loom, raising and lowering alternate warp threads of the darn, so all you have to do is pass the needle and thread between them like a shuttle:

Speedweve instructions

I tested the Speedweve last night on a pair of much-loved but holey wool tights, and found to my delight that using it really was as easy as following the instructions. After less than an hour I ended up with a not-terribly-tidy but perfectly adequate 2″x2″ patch.

If I’d had a bit more experience with the Speedweve and mended the tights before the hole got so big — or, better yet, before it became a hole at all — it would have taken me still less time. Even if I weren’t counting coupons, that’s still an acceptable trade-off by my math, since a pair of merino tights costs about the same as an hour of my time as a freelancer (my default “is it worth the bother?” yardstick).

What a pleasing little device! The fact that technological and market changes would render it totally obsolete within a couple of decades of its invention only increases its whimsical appeal.

I was charmed by this tutorial at CraftStylish into making a travel sewing kit, but although an Altoids tin is handy for emergency supplies, it’s too small to store everything I need for regular sewing and embroidery (especially crewel — the wool takes up a lot of space). So I biggified mine. I love the two travel kits — one for sewing and one for embroidery — I made from sweet tins and fabric scraps. They fit easily into a handbag and contain everything I need to work on my projects in spare moments away from home. Idle hands and all that.

Embroidery kit

Sewing and mending kit

It’s ridiculously easy to make your own with a similar tin and scraps from your sewing room. Then, when you want to take your project with you (even just to the couch) it’s just a matter of grab and go. My kits are stuffed with my favorite sewing and embroidery shinies and include a needle-polishing pincushion and a magnetic needle keeper… because you don’t ever want to have to wonder whether the person who sits in your seat next will “discover” the needle you mislaid.

I started by cutting out a felt bottom, as in the tutorial. A felt bottom is a great idea. It stops me rattling like a gypsy dancer every time I run to catch a bus. I made mine by tracing around the tin and cutting out on the line with pinking shears.

Using pinking shears prevents me from obsessing about how the felt isn’t absolutely! perfectly! fitted to the bottom of the tin every time I open it. I hot-glued it in place.

Then I made the pincushion. I traced around the lid of the tin on to a fabric scrap and cut out as before. Then I cut a smaller version of the same shape out of my piece of card, making it a little over 1/2″ smaller on all sides to give a seam allowance plus a little extra room for stuffing.

Then I ran a line of gathering stitches all the way around the fabric, well within the seam allowance.

I put the cardboard back in the middle of the fabric, held it down and gently pulled up on the ends of the bobbin threads to gather the edges slightly…

…then removed the cardboard and stuffed some steel wool into the hollow. Steel wool apparently polishes your needles and keeps them sharp.

I stuck the cardboard back on top of the steel wool, pulled up the threads until the fabric sat snugly around the cardboard, smoothed out the gathers evenly all the way around the circle and knotted the ends to finish the pincushion.

And then we hot glue!

Now for the needle keeper. Super easy. I just took a 1″ badge (this one’s from Wool & Hoop) and pried out the pin back, then stuck a 15 mm neodymium magnet inside instead.

Neodymium magnets are super strong and fun to play with! The needle keeper lives inside my sewing kit, but when I sew I stick it on the lid to keep my needle from roaming when I put my work down for a moment. The curved surface of the badge makes the needle easy to grab.

I also keep one on the knob of my sewing machine to keep my basting and tacking needles handy.

Now the fun part: stuffing your sewing kit full of shinies! Skeins of embroidery thread get hopelessly tangled up. Why not wind them neatly on some vintage-style thread cards from Sajou?

You’ll need some scissors, of course. I don’t know about you, but I find that scissors, like needles, vaporize whenever I put them down for more than 3 seconds. So I use a scissors holder that hangs around my neck on a chain. I got mine from Des Fils et une Aiguille in Paris, but I’ve also seen them online.

Add a couple of needle threaders and you’ve got all you need for embroidery!

My sewing and mending kit contains slightly different supplies. I keep my needles in a wooden needle case (again from Des Fils et une Aiguille, but take a look at these), and I stash scissors, a thimble, a few pins in a scrap of felt, safety pins for emergencies, a seam ripper, buttonhole twist, darning thread and whatever hand sewing thread my project requires. I also carry a measuring tape, in addition to the one I keep in my handbag. I never knew how many things in my life needed measuring until I started carrying a measuring tape.

With this kit I can hem a garment, sew on a button, mend a rip or darn a hole (wool tights are £30 a pair!). I am Ready for Anything that can be tackled with a needle and thread.

As far as I know, everything in these kits is airplane-safe. Actually, I’ve flown with them several times within Europe and nobody’s so much as asked to look inside. Those who have to negotiate TSA screenings may have a different experience.

I’d love to know what you stash in your kit for craftiness on the go!

Tagged: embroidery, gifts, how to, shinies ]]> http://cargocultcraft.com/2010/01/11/travel-sewing-needlecraft-ki/feed/ 8 Susannah Embroidery kit Sewing and mending kit Tracing the felt bottom Sticking in the felt bottom Cutting out pincushion Gathering stitches Gathering for the pincushion Steel wool in pincushion Pincushion Pincushion Badge and magnet Needle keeper back Needle keeper Needle keeper Sajou thread cards Embroidery kit Sewing and mending kit