Violet's Tiny Embroidered Buckwheat Hull Pillow

She has had this project going for a couple years now, but recently wrapped it up.



First she embroidered the muslin with a design to please her american girl doll Ruthie, which she received from grandma Mary some time ago. She is almost done with a dress she designed and made for Ruthie, but perhaps more on that later.

After the embroidery was done, she sewed it up with the Singer 99, leaving an opening to put in filling.

While we were in Maine last fall for cider 11, we milled some buckwheat Ben had grown on his small orchard up there using a bike powered Country Living grain mill. The first step was to run the grain through at a wide burr spacing to crack off the hulls.

I think I had told Child 1 that I had once spent a very pleasant night in a ryokan in Kyoto sleeping on a pillow stuffed with buckwheat hulls. So she asked if we could save some hulls to use in a pillow, and Dave obligingly swept up a shopping sack full for us to take home.

The bag of hulls sat on the shelf in the basement for a few months. We pulled it out and devised a scheme for cutting down on the extraneous material in the hull filling. First we riddled the hulls through a coarse mesh to take out leaves, sticks, and straw. For this step the hulls pass through the mesh, but bigger stuff stays behind.

Next we tossed in a sieve for a few minutes, the idea being that the hulls would stay above the seive, but smaller bits and dirt would fall through. Lastly we hand picked out a few remaining bits of debris.

We filled the pillow using the cleaned up hulls through a funnel.

Child 1 hand stitched the opening up.

Nice doll pillow!

I wonder if we should take enough hulls next year to make a person sized pillow? Not sure if Ben is growing buckwheat this year again or not.

Making Felt Hats

A few years ago I made myself a gnome style gray felt hat with a big red flower on it. It is my go to hat for cool to cold weather and I wear it frequently. The kids like to wear my hat too, and for some time have been asking to have tall felt hats of their own.



These hats are made from a charcoal gray wool/rayon blend felt made by National Nonwovens, purchased here (style TOY2003). When I first made my hat, I didn't have much experience with felt, other than knowing for sure that I didn't want the dryer lint-like garbage they sell as felt at the craft store. The National Nonwovens blends are affordable, came in many colors, and appeared to be reasonable quality, so I thought I would try it out. It turned out to be rather too thin for a winter hat, so I made two hats and nested them together. My hat has held up well over the few years I've been wearing it, but in future I think I'll try harder to work in 100% wool felt. Having used both the blend and all wool felt for dollmaking, it is abundantly clear that the 100% wool is a far superior product. It is stronger, better looking, more cohesive, and harder wearing than the blend, though it is significantly more expensive.

In my family, I'm mostly the one taking pictures and as a consequence I have few pictures of myself, and none with my hat on. But someone else took this picture of me riding the press bike with Child 1 at cider weekend 2011 with my hat on. Yes, I'm also wearing wooden shoes. This year a newcomer to cider weekend saw me in the same outfit and said "What's this? The cider elf?" What they did not know is that I look like this all the time, not just for cider!

A few months ago we embarked on making hats for Violet and Millie. I had a bunch of the wool blend felt left, so we just used that rather than buying new material. Though I'm not completely satisfied with it, I already have it and it has served adequately in my own hat.


Millie's Hat
First we made up a simple paper pattern from head measurements.

 The base of the cone pattern is 1/2 head circumference plus a little extra. The height of the cone is taken from the location of the future edge of the hat up to the future hat tip on the side of the head. However, this hat turned out too small, so we had another go at it with increased dimensions.

Millie cut and basted together the halves of the inner and outer hats, and did a few of the whip stitches to join them up.

 I stitched up the remainder, then spent some time steaming the hats to shape them and stick them together.

Then I sewed them together at the rim with the D-9 treadle.

I had a helper to turn the balance wheel when starting.

Millie wanted her hat to look exactly like mine, so I made another little flower applique out of nicer 100% wool felt and put it on.

Done!

And a happy hat owner!

Violet's Hat
Violet wanted to do her own decoration on her hat, so we put some of the blend felt in a hoop and she drew what she wanted to embroider on a piece of paper. I helped transfer the design outline to the fabric, then she embroidered it, which took about a month of on and off work by Violet.

We just used my hat as a pattern this time, but made it a little smaller with the same vertex angle at the top of the cone.

Violet cut out the pieces, pinned them, and whip stitched the inner hat. I did the outer one (the one with the embroidery). Once again I steamed the two hats together, then pinned them in place. Violet stitched them together with the Singer 99 handcrank.

She was very pleased with her design.

And very pleased with the hat!

Greist mechanical buttonholer on a handcranked Singer 99

I've been making all buttonholes by hand since I moved to exclusive use of my treadle machine a little over a year ago. I like handmade buttonholes (although some of mine can get pretty ugly!), but even doing them poorly takes me a lot of time.

Last year I bought a mechanical buttonholer for something like $30 on ebay, figuring I could make an adapter to put it on my D-9. It is a Greist, and is all metal construction with die cast templates. After getting the buttonholer, it looked like it was going to be more challenging than I had hoped to make the pieces to put it on the W&W, so its been sitting on the shelf while I spend a lot of time doing buttonholes by hand.

But just the other week I brought in a hand crank Singer 99 for my kids, and it has a standard low shank foot. So last weekend I tried putting the buttonholer on to do the holes for a button fly on the second muslin for the pants I've been trying to make for the last couple months. It is fantastic! Quick to set up, easy to use, fast and efficient, and makes a nice buttonhole. It is also entertaining to watch, and has a nice sound to it as you crank: click-click-click-click...



Here is my buttonholer layed out on the counter for inspection by Child 1. My unit came with a number of cams, and I see that extras are not hard to find on ebay.

Here is my fly getting buttonholes. So much faster than hand buttonholes! Once they are layed out and everything is set up (tensions, stitch length/width, etc.) it takes less than a minute to do a buttonhole.

With setup and cleanup time added it, it would make sense to do one buttonhole by hand. But if there are more, this charming contraption will start to shine. There is a discussion on Treadle On right now about buttonhole options for old sewing machines, and Helen Howes from the UK wrote that she has done 10,000 buttonholes with her attachment! Awesome!

To sum up, I am extremely pleased with my buttonholer and looked forward to using it extensively. For a few buttonholes that are highly visible or that I want to make especially interesting, I'll continue to improve my hand work. But for the rest I'll be cranking them out (quite literally) with the Greist on the 99.

Handcrank Singer 99 in the house

My two daughters (4 and 6 yrs) are always very interested when I do any sewing on my W&W D-9 treadle machine, and really want to use the machine themselves. This is difficult since they are not big enough to both have their hands manipulating the work and their feet on the treadle to drive the belt. Its also tricky to get the belt going the right way every time until you get used to it, and if the action is run in reverse for more than a stitch or two things will get tangled up or at least unthreaded. Most machines treadle D-9s have an anti-reverse pawl riding on the flywheel, but mine was broken and I haven't bothered to fix it yet.

I asked about a good people-powered kids machine on Treadle On, and the overwhelming response was that the Singer 99 in handcrank configuration was an excellent machine for kids. With the handcrank there is no ambiguity about which way its going to run the machine when you start cranking it. The kids can also reach the handcrank and guide the fabric reasonably at the same time, this machine being a little smaller than typical. I just finished reading an interesting biography of I.M. Singer by Ruth Brandon, so I was also happy to enjoy some fruits of the Singer empire.

Sewing with a treadle sewing machine

Why bother?

Vintage machines are generally cheap, reliable, oftentimes repairable and serviceable by the user, and can stand up well to years of heavy use. The ones still around in good shape have proven themselves worthy in a Darwinian sense. I would be surprised if a $1500 machine bought new today and packed with plastic and electronics is still around and useable 100 years from now.

A treadled machine specifically will be quiet to use, doesn't need a cord to the wall, and will work even if the power goes out. I also get more of a sense of control over the stitching with the treadle machine. My WW9 has a large, heavy balance wheel that makes stitching with hand power in tricky spots convenient and enjoyable.

A Treadle Machine finds a new Home

Wheeler & Wilson No. 9

Looking forward to starting my new life free from commercial clothing vendors, I began cruising craigslist and ebay for a suitable treadle table to house my newly acquired Necchi BU Nova. Becky and I agreed that a good looking treadle table would be best located in the dining room, where we could use is as a little sideboard or side table to put flowers when it is closed up. As you might expect, there were plenty of options on craigslist for cheap, but I was picky and wanted something that looked (or could look) great, was in reasonable shape and so wouldn't need a ton of work, and also not too big in size.

So I bought this Wheeler and Wilson No. 9 from a guy in Salem, who was kind enough to deliver it for an extra fee.