In Spring of 2023, I took part in a quilt block swap! The subreddit is here. The theme for the season as bookshelf blocks, and could be as simple or complex as you wanted, as long as they were the same size, used Kona black as the background, and had at least one book.
A group of 16 quilters is chosen based on their location so shipping costs aren’t a big concern. Then everyone makes at least 16 blocks: one to keep, and one (or more) to send out to each other quilter.
My block is the one seen above. In the final result, you will see it just to the right of the lava lamp block. For the shelving parts, I wanted fabrics that resembled wood, and I wanted a good grain pattern for the quilting stitch. I was very lucky to find the exact kind of fabric I was looking for at my local fabric store!
Because the quilting stitch I wanted was too complex for me to handle, I knew I would have to send it out to be done by a professional with a longarm machine. I found a local person to do just that! And it came out great!
Here it is hanging up with an invisible magnetic hanger, with wood grain pattern! The corners curl a little, but I think it looks fine. So what was supposed to be late Father’s Day present became an on-time Christmas present!
A few years ago I attended a flea market where I found a soft floral patterned shirt, perfect a hot summer day. Made of a viscose fabric, I fell in love with it and quickly found another similar shirt of the same brand. The problem — one that I face constantly while clothes shopping — was that the shirts weren’t quite long enough.
I knew what I had to do.
I started buying up lengths of viscose and rayon fabrics from others’ stashes, building up my own stash in the process to make my own shirts!
I had made a shirt or two of questionable quality in the past, but I knew for these fabrics, I would need a more reliable, a more worthy solution to making good shirts.
There were a few ways I could have gone about this:
find a new pattern for my shirts
make a pattern totally from scratch using men’s pattern-making books
copy a pattern off of the original shirt
After trying 1 and 2 before and not liking the results, I decided to have a crack at copying the pattern of the flea-market shirt. I won’t go into detail, but the process was easier than I thought. After the initial copy and test-shirt with muslin fabric, I made a few modifications (lengthening the collar and height of the shirt), I was ready to go.
Here are one of the results! It’s my favorite of the shirts. Notice the length: great for tucking into your pants but also keeping any accidental midriff totally un-exposed!
I LOVE these shirts! I’m so happy with how they turned out: they’re comfortable, soft, breezy, and (tooting my own horn) I think I look good in them.
This is exactly the kind of thing I want to do in life: solving the problems I have with modern men’s fashion:
Size: I have trouble finding shirts of the right size. I typically need a ‘long’ variety that can be found at only so many stores, and typically only online at that. This contributes to issue 2…
Options: Maybe I’m just sorely unaware of men’s fashion, but to me it seems that women have so many more options when it comes to what is ‘acceptable’ to wear. Pants of various lengths, blouses, shirts, dresses, skirts, blazers, cardigans, all sorts of different shoes… And don’t even get me started on the different fabric patterns they can choose from! In my experience, I as a man don’t have so many options. If women’s shirts fit me, I’d be at the thrift store much more often.
Problems and Lessons
Collars. They are confusing to put together the first few times.
Pattern modification: easier when patterns are copied onto tracing fabric! When I needed to lengthen the shirt, I simply sewed a few inches of tracing fabric to the bottom of the shirt blocks, easy-peasy.
Fray-block: VERY useful for keeping buttons and button-holes in check.
Serging/overlocking: I have an old overlocker I got from my mother. Even after getting it serviced, the store said it had a few problems. Otherwise it works, but my understanding of it’s working it limited. Luckily all the serged seams are INSIDE the shirt and not outside!
Delicateness of the fabric: It is important to run them through the washing machine on a gentle cycle and to use a garment bag. I’ve had to repair many split seams, and even a rip or two. Very sad when I notice a rip 🙁
I’m not sure what inspired me to undertake this challenge. But I had an idea for a quilt. Two decapitated Greek statue torsos done by paper piecing. Of course, I doubted anyone had a quilt pattern for sale for something like this. So I had to make one of my own.
A software called Quilt Assistant was actually the perfect tool for the job! With it was able to create paper piecing patterns from two images.
The project files I for Quilt Assistant can be downloaded here:
A little tangent: this software is the kind of thing I dream of creating someday: it solves a specific yet general-enough problem in a cool way, AND it’s free!
After creating the patterns, I went to choose a limited palette of colors and made a trip to my local fabric store. Overall, designing wasn’t an easy process, but it sure as hell did not get easier from there!
Quilt Assistant has a great printing option where you can print out paper-piecing patterns, similar to ones you might get from an online seller. As is true with all artistic media, there is more than one way to do it.
You can print out the piecing patterns on regular paper, sewing directly through it, and rip the pattern away when you’re done. Or — this is the option I went with — you can somehow print the pattern on freezer paper. What’s great about freezer paper is that it has a waxy side. What isn’t great about it is that it does not go through a printer on its own. So my workflow went something like this:
Cut a piecing of freezer paper down to the size of a sheet of printer paper (a little bit smaller so it doesn’t snag during printing).
Iron the freezer paper to a sheet of regular printer paper by putting the waxy side against the regular paper.
Put the paper + freezer paper combo in your printer, making sure the print will be applied to the non-waxy side of the freezer paper, not the regular paper.
Once printed, peel away the freezer paper, and cut out the pattern pieces. You can reuse this sheet of paper for more pattern pieces a few more times!
Take the printed and cut-out pattern pieces, and carefully yet firmly crease them along the pattern lines using a ruler.
Start piecing! I found a great video explaining the process here
Freezer paper piecing is great for times when you need to make multiple blocks using the same piecing pattern. In my case, this was not happening. I could have saved a lot of time by just printing out the pattern on regular paper, but I did find that ironing the pattern directly onto the fabric (instead of using pins) to be very easy, especially for the finer-detailed sections.
Once the pattern pieces are finished, they themselves can be pieced together to start forming the final image! Here’s an example of the partially-pieced male torso, where three missing pattern parts are not yet completed.
After a grueling number of months sewing, ripping seams to undo mistakes, and questioning every decision I made leading up to this, I had the torsos done!
I couldn’t find any pictures of the basting or quilting process, but the size of the quilt made it exceptionally easy compared to my other projects. For quilting I decided to try to ‘trace out’ the contours of the bodies using straight lines and angular patterns, trying to evoke an ancient Greek motif. On the background, I did a jumping-wavy pattern to try to look like clouds. It didn’t come out as I had hoped and looks a little childish.
After this, I put on the binding. I wanted to try to give a 3D window effect on the binding: the top and right side would be lighter, and the bottom and left would be darker. I ended up using the same pattern of fabric for this using two different available colors. Unfortunately I think that effect is lost. Writing this up about a year later (Feb 2024) after finishing it in March 2023 (when I will mark this post as ‘posted’), I had totally forgotten about this until I started thinking consciously about how I did the binding process.
Lastly, as an art piece, I put a hanging sleeve on it, and found the coolest invisible magnetic hanger system, so it hangs on the wall with nothing extra showing.
Despite the challenges faced and creative decisions I now don’t really like, I do actually like this quilt. It was incredibly ambitious for me to undertake at my skill level, much like the queen-size Labyrinth quilt. However, much like that project, I ended up with a satisfactory result and I learned much more than I could have imagined.
Problems and Lessons
Fabric choices:
I should have chosen a different fabric for one of the dark colors. You can see on the bottom left, in the leg of the female torso, how that dark fabric has a lighter spot on it. This would be fine for large pieces like that, but for small detailed pieces, a mistake could easily be made where only the lighter color in the fabric pattern is showing.
There needed to be a better intermediate color choice in the palette. The spectrum of colors chosen makes an abrupt jump, seen where the shoulders meet the top of the chest on both torsos.
I could have chosen a better background that better contrasts the lighter colors of the torsos. You can see at the shoulder area how the light color grays can blend in too easily with the background.
The people at the fabric store are always great at helping me choose fabrics for a pattern. They talked me out of using all solid colors, which is fine, but sometimes fabrics don’t need patterns. I quite like the look of the modern art-quilt that uses solid colors.
Freezer paper: For a one-off pattern like this, I would have had a much easier time using regular paper and disposing of it, rather than trying to make reusable patterns I may never actually reuse.
For now, I’ll leave this piece as is. I think it looks quite nice above the head of my bed!
My grandmother was VERY into quilting. She’d been making quilts probably well before I was born. In her last few years, she was unfortunately unable to work on her projects like she used to, and by the time she passed, I had not discovered my own love for sewing.
I see my quilting as a way to honor her, even to apologize for not appreciating the time and effort that went into each quilt she gave to her grandchildren.
Everything that remains of her quilting and sewing projects were split among her children. When it became known that I had picked up quilting, I was asked if I would be interested in finishing some of her unfinished projects, which I was more than happy to do. I received a plastic tub with three small quilts, all finished with the exception of the binding. All that was left was hand-stitching the binding.
My mother and I spent the Christmas of 2022 hand-stitching the binding on all three quilts, and finished in just about a day’s time. Finally, these quilts sent out to family members, going to good homes.
These are some great examples of one of the kinds of quilts my grandmother made. She loved her batiks. I really like the pink and green one, especially the border pattern.
Throughout my childhood, my family had a quilt-hanging shelf in the kitchen on which we would hang a different quilt, made by my grandmother for each season. This was during a time before I appreciated the work and artistry that goes into a quilt.
If I remember correctly, when I started quilting, my mother had suggested that she wanted a quilt to hang in the new house, with some specific color requirements to fit the decor style. This would be an easy undertaking, so I thought, as a wall hanging would not need to be nearly as big as, for example, the Labyrinth quilt I did for my cousin’s wedding.
When I give big gifts, I like to do exercise my creative ‘abilities’ and make something of my own for the recipient specifically. Of course for the Labyrinth quilt, I bought a pattern to make, but I had no experience with quilt making or quilt design. Now that I had that project behind me, I started experimented with a few designs using Quilt Assistant, a free software, focusing on the purple, gray and blue.
The prototype, titled “Waffleiron” for its woven grid pattern, was a simple 30″ x 30″ mini quilt. I used the concepts of creating a larger pattern using irregular ‘block’ sizes I learned from the Labyrinth pattern, as compared to the often traditional-style block quilt I was used to seeing.
I liked the choice of the two blue fabrics that make up the central grid and corner crosses. Unfortunately, the purple for the straight pieces did not stand out as much as I had hoped. It’s a good thing I did this prototype! I send it out to my great-aunt for her to quilt.
The second design was the final 60″ x 60″ wall hanging. I don’t remember any snags or issues during the design or piecing stage. The challenges came during the basting and quilting. To make basting easier, I tried the ‘noodle method’, in which the backing fabric, basting, and quilt top are each rolled around a pool noodle or pipe insulation, and then rolled out on a flat surface (first the backing, then the batting, and lastly the top) to create a pucker-free quilt sandwich. It went quite well, and I basted using safety pins as I rolled out the tubes.
Next came the quilting, which I wanted to do myself this time instead of sending it out. I got a quilting foot and templates, as well as lessons on how to use them from the lovely people my local fabric store. I also found a thread I liked, a blue and white multicolored thread which worked quite nicely with my quilt’s color scheme.
This thread became the bane of my existence for a short time. It kept breaking and snapping and getting too tight to work with. Turns out that pretty multicolor threads are quite delicate compared to single colored threads. Once I slowed down and took my time with the stencils, quilting got less frustrating.
The templates were a cool way to create large quilt motifs on my machine, no long-arm needed! But they can be hard to get right. You have to keep the speed of the stitching and the speed of your hands moving the quilt consistent to get perfect results. On top of that, knowing what template to use and when to use them was not my strength. I ended up with a mess of different quilt motifs all over the finished product. I kept it symmetrical, but it looks too ‘amateur’ to me now.
Looking at this picture of the center of the quilt, it doesn’t look so bad. But it is a departure from the traditional method of using the same quilting stitch over the entire quilt. What I’m learning about myself in quilting is that I don’t really follow ‘tradition’
Finally, I gave it a tag with its title and my name…
And after binding and putting an invisible hanging sleeve on the back, it was ready for gifting just in time for Christmas!
Problems and Lessons
This went pretty smoothly! The only problem I had was during quilting. There wasn’t much I could do to remedy the poor look of some of the quilting stitches, but I know better when and how to use the pattern templates, and when I should consider getting it professionally quilted.
I’ll admit, I got a little cocky. I thought, with two years of sewing under my belt, that I could handle a quilt. Not just a quilt, a queen size quilt. Why such a crazy idea? What could drive me to such a thing? A wedding, for which I would need a gift. I love making stuff by hand, and I’d been wanting to try quilting something — it runs in the family! My grandmother (whose sewing machine I use) was BIG into quilting. She even had a longarm machine in her basement. So I’ve had quilting in my blood since day one. Not to mention my other, living family members who are quilting as well. Quilting is my destiny.
Before I had started sewing in 2020, I was caught by a small dorky movement on the internet, the Cape Revolution, whose goal was to bring back capes as a valid fashion item in 2020 and beyond. I wanted to be a part of that — who wouldn’t??
Capes of the styles I desire are either too expensive or hard to find, so making one myself was a perfect solution. Yet, similarly to the clothing market, the sewing pattern market appears to be dominated by women’s clothing. Most in-depth and fancy cape sewing patterns typically come in small sizes and more feminine styles and shapes. It was discouraging to realize at the time, having few options as a man. But I knew, with practice, I could be altering and designing my own cape sewing patterns.
For my first cape, I went with Simplicity 8263 – it can be lined (which can help make it warming, which in turn makes it practical) and it was simple! I bought some dark navy wool coating online, expecting it to be a bit thicker than it turned out being… For the lining, I had a good amount of some synthetic fabric I got from my local sewing store’s scrap bin.
It went smoothly — except the armholes. I was lazy. I didn’t bother doing a hidden slip stitch by hand. I should have, it makes a significantly nicer finished product.
Quite proud of myself, albeit disappointed at the lack of weight to the wool, I offered or was asked by a friend if I could make one for them (they supply the fabric). I happily obliged! But that cape will be in another post!
When I started sewing in 2020, I had great aspirations for what I would be able to create. However, as a tall man, there aren’t a lot of options for me in terms of sewing patterns or manufactured dress forms. Luckily, I came across the Bootstrap Fashion custom dress forms, where you put in your measurements and get a printable PDF pattern. It looked challenging, but I knew would pay off if it came out well.
base
I named him Crognor. He is not perfect be he is mine. The main fabric is a floral upholstery fabric with fusible interfacing, the internal structure is some basic denim or canvas, the neck part is stuffed with a thick sponge cut to fit, and he is stuffed with 10 lbs of Polyfill.
The design of these dress forms uses an internal structure to allow for PVC pipes of various diameters to be inserted and used as a base. I went out and bought a length of PVC pipe of whatever diameter and had it cut to length so that, when standing upright with Crognor on it, his shoulders would line up with mine.
But I still had no stand for the pipe! This was easily the hardest part. The original solution was pretty creative in my opinion. I got a large umbrella stand compatible with the diameter of the pipe and a heavy base (this is what the black part on the existing stand is from). Unfortunately, this based proved to have too large a footprint and also scratched up the wood floors of my apartment at the time.
The alternative is what you see now: two 16″ lengths of 4″x4″, cut to fit into each other as shown. It has a much smaller footprint, is more lightweight, and is much cleaner than the umbrella stand.
Overall, Crognor does have some mistakes. The internal canvas structure is a little too low (I didn’t have it aligned correctly when I sewed it in place). This makes the upper chest area a little wonky, but it doesn’t show up very well in photos. The shoulders are also quite wide. The intent for the flat armscye parts is to be vertical, but you can see clearly that they are angled outwards at the top (this is likely because I made an inaccurate shoulder measurement). The red horizontal zigzagging lines marks the chest, waist, and hips. Though there’s no issue in their placement, the length of the stitches is inconsistent, only because I hadn’t learned how to use my machine properly or make good consistent stitches.
Overall, I’m still proud of this! I now wish I had waited until I had some more sewing experience under my belt, but that’s just not how I work when it comes to my creative endeavors – go big or go home. I’d love to redo this at some point so the shoulders and chest wouldn’t be so goofy. But I have plenty of other stuff to make until then!
I could find no progress pictures of this quilt. It was meant only for practicing paper piecing for my later project, the Greek statue art quilt. I got the pattern from Etsy.
You can see on the top left where I ran out of the yellow floral fabric (that I only had a fat quarter of). And you can also see where I messed up the yellow stripes on the middle segment.
This quilt is functionally useless, and not the prettiest. I still keep it around anyway to remind myself of how far I’ve come.
