As the title says, I finished the skirt. I now have a warm, sturdy, colourful, pocket-equipped skirt.

This is kind of what I had in mind for the skirt that I gave up on – an irregular composition of semi-random pieces of fabric. I intentionally let the shape of the fabric pieces guide the design, rather than drawing something and then trying to make the pieces fit.

While at least two of the fabrics had a clear front and reverse side, I decided to ignore that. If the piece fit and the grain was right, then I used it regardless of which way it was facing.

This way I could make the whole skirt with very little waste. I have several larger pieces left over that could become something (throw pillows?) as well as smaller scraps for decoration, patching or applique.

I started sewing a winter skirt last season but then got sidetracked and never finished it. Now it’s cold again and I want something thick and warm and long and cosy to wear. Plus it will be nice to get that project pile off my sideboard.

I’m piecing it together from leftover fabric from the red skirt and the brown skirt and some new cream-coloured wool that I bought at the crafts festival last year.

I don’t have a clear idea of what the skirt will look like, but I found two pieces of red that are about the right shape and size for a yoke-ish part. While I ponder the rest of the design, I can get started on the pockets.

Nysse, as usual, had his own ideas of what a pile of wool fabric is good for.

Lovely ribbon, pretty and sturdy. Thick and wide, which is great for comfort, but I hadn’t quite thought through how that would affect its behaviour. I want the strap to be adjustable so I can wear it either around my waist or cross-body over a shoulder. I thought I could just leave the ribbon ends quite long and tie it differently. When I tried it out with this actual ribbon, the result was bulky and visually way too much. I felt like a gift-wrapped parcel with the large bow that it made. Or maybe a flower girl. A new plan is needed. Maybe snaps?

Finally got started with that loose pocket I’ve been thinking about for ages.

Designed and cut and measured and started assembling. I got the horizontal seams done today so the structure is all there now. There will be a open pocket space, big enough for a phone, and a small zippered inside pocket for keys. Just the vertical seams left now.

The outer is piece of scrap fabric from the local charity shop. It may have been a small tablecloth in a previous life. The lining is a piece of an old fabric dying experiment that I have inherited.

This is a slow sewing project. Constructed from scratch and hand-stitched. I especially enjoy making tiny little whip stitches to secure a folded edge.

Fixed the chest. It turned out that Eric had already done one round of fixing years before: there were strips of wood attached along the long edges to keep the bottom in place. Now there are similar strips on the short edges, so unless and until the bottom actually cracks under pressure, it should stay in place.

Then I had to fit all the fabric into the chest again. Plus a bit more, because I had one or two recently bought pieces that I hadn’t packed away yet. It was stuffed to the brim before. How will it all fit?

I threw out a very few pieces, and moved scraps that were only good for rags into a separate rag bag. (You never know when you need a soft fabric rag for polishing something.) Re-folded much of the rest into flatter, wider shapes, and somehow managed to fit it all in there again.

Linens and solid woven cottons on the left.

Jerseys and printed cottons next to those.

Upholstery fabric and entire garments (shirts and trousers in good fabrics).

Wools, furs, and shiny fabrics.

Bags of small scraps on top of everything.

I own pieces of actual rabbit fur. Whatever will I use them for? No idea, but they don’t deserve to be thrown away, that’s for sure.

All I wanted was to find some fabric scraps for sewing a small loose pocket.

As I lifted out a stack of fabric from my fabric chest, I realised that the bottom was this close to falling out. The chest is about thirty years old and somewhat cheaply made to begin with. The fact that I sometimes press the lid down to compress the contents hasn’t helped its structural integrity. The bottom is a thin sheet of plywood, held in place by grooves in the sides. Pressure has made it bend, and it’s really not staying in those grooves any more.

I have my sewing materials now, but I also have a living room corner heaped with fabric, and a DIY project waiting for me.

It’s pasha season, but the cloth I used to line the pasha mould with went with Eric. (It was part of a juice strainer.) We can’t have Easter without pasha, so it is time to make a replacement.

Cordon Bleu, the kitchen goods store on Vasagatan, had not one but two kinds of muslin/cheesecloth. There is more of a market for this than I thought. I bought the smaller variety, 100% cotton, and my project for today was to sew a liner for the pasha mould.

It took forever. Literally hours and hours. It’s such a small thing – but that just means it has many small fiddly seams, and an awkward 3D shape. And all the seams needed to be enclosed, because we do not want bits of cotton thread in our food or between our teeth. And I must still be doing something wrong with my sewing machine because several times I did something that mucked up the tension on the bottom thread, and had to untangle it and re-do the seam.

But! Now I have a liner. I will be using it until the day that I die, to make it worth the effort. And then my children and my children’s children will be obliged use it until the end of their lives as well, until the cloth falls apart.

The pasha itself went much faster and easier.

I sewed a wheat warmer. Both because I wanted one, and because this seemed like a good first project to actually make friends with the new sewing machine. (The first attempt didn’t get me very far.) A wheat warmer is small and simple, has nothing but straight seams, and doesn’t involve any challenging fabrics.

The outer covering is a barely-used towel that I think we got as a gift. I like the look of the fabric, and it’s thick and nice. It went a few rounds in the kitchen but I was always disappointed in its inability to dry things – it’s a 50/50 cotton/linen mix, and I’ve come to expect the absorbing power of pure linen. Then it spent some years in my fabric stash, and now it got a second life, to which it is much better suited.

For the inner pillow I cut up a storage bag that came with a pair of upmarket shoes. And the filling is plain barley.

Learning point (obvious in hindsight): The final measurements of the pillow are smaller than the cut measurements, even when I’ve properly calculated and measured the seam allowances, because the filling puffs it up and pulls it in. I was aiming for a slightly larger pillow. But it’s good enough. Much better than the store-bought one I had before, which wasn’t divided into pockets, so all the filling immediately ended up at one end, no matter how I held it.

I struggled with the sewing machine. So much. The bottom thread kept breaking all the time. I’d start, and sew five or six centimetres, only to discover that the thread has broken again, and rip it out and start over. Or I’d make it as far as 15 out of 30 centimetres, and then – too far from the edge to rip it all out – skip back and stitch over the last bit again.

Finally I figured out that this (only?) happened after I stopped and started. Obviously there’s a start at the edge, but I’d also stop at each pin to take it out, because I didn’t want to sew over them, and then of course I start again. Somehow at each stop-and-start the tension of the bottom thread goes wonky and it gets tangled around the bobbin axis and then of course it breaks.

With more experimentation I noticed that the problem didn’t happen if I managed to stop with the needle properly in the down position. You’d want to do that anyway for turning corners and such, not for the sake of the machine but to keep the fabric in place. For just taking out a pin it normally wouldn’t matter much. Except on this machine it clearly does.

Then I realized that the important bit was not the stopping but the starting. If I “take off” with the needle in the optimal position (all the way down) then I guess the bobbin thread gets the right tension from the start and doesn’t break. Otherwise it gets tangled for some reason.

That meant it didn’t matter so much if I couldn’t always manage to stop at the exact right moment. (I need more practice with the foot pedal for that kind of precision timing.) When I happened to stop with the needle not down, I could hand-wheel the last little bit to get the needle where the machine wanted it to be, do whatever I needed with the pins or what not, and then I and the machine would be in position for a good start.

Even though I now have a way around the problem, it’s still rather annoying to have to be so persnickety about the needle position. This doesn’t seem entirely normal, and the user manual says nothing about this kind of behaviour. But I guess I’ll live with it. We’re maybe not friends yet, but sort of getting there.

I bought a new old sewing machine, but haven’t actually tried using it until now. Today Ingrid wanted to hem a pair of jeans, and I realized I didn’t even know how to thread the machine.

Just winging it based on past experience didn’t work. Compared to Eric’s old Bernina, nothing quite works the same. But – thank goodness for the Internet – I could buy a PDF scan of the original user’s manual for 75 SEK, and that finally got me sorted.

I got nice and tidy seams with ordinary sewing thread, but didn’t manage to get the tension right with a thicker polyester thread, no matter how I adjusted it. The top thread was always too loose. Turning the tension knob towards “looser” made it noticeably worse, but tightening did not make it better. Maybe it would work better with a thicker fabric to match the thick thread?

Anyway, getting a handle on the basics took me so long that Ingrid had already finished hand-seaming her jeans hems. I guess I’ll just stick to normal thread and normal fabric to begin with, and tackle this again later if a need arises.

Our lovely Bernina sewing machine was inherited from Eric’s mother, and will soon be leaving with Eric.

Every household needs a sewing machine, and I’d find it difficult to manage without one. Today I found a new sewing machine. Or rather, an old one. Here’s my new old Husqvarna Automatic 21 A. Shiny and green!

According to one site, this particular model was produced from 1958 to 1961, so it is probably even older than the Bernina. For back-stitching, you press and hold a button on this one, whereas on the Bernina you push the stitch length lever to the opposite side, so you can use both hands while back-stitching. But the Husqvarna is a fancier model, featuring a whole bunch of decorative stitches.

I’m quite unlikely to use the decorative stitches much. All I want from my sewing machine in terms of features is straight stitches forwards and backwards, and zig-zag. Possibly, maybe, buttonholes.

What I really want is reliability and repairability. I want a stable, solid metal body, and an absolute minimum of plastic components. With care and regular maintenance, this one should keep going for decades yet.

Also it doesn’t hurt that this cost me only 800 SEK.