Today I took a day’s holiday from work, to go to a symposium in Oxford about the care and maintenance of natural history collections in museums.
Unfortunately, when I got up this morning, it became apparent that the central heating had stopped working, so I had to stay at home and wait for someone to come and fix it. Thank goodness for the British Gas home care insurance – we’ve only lived here for a month, and it’s the third time we’ve called them already!
While I was waiting, I popped the fan heater on in my sewing room, and wrapped myself up with a scarf and fingerless gloves. The end result of a day’s work has turned out to be the little mountain of polar fleece you can see above. Eight more hats waiting for the brims and the bands to be sewn by hand, and another twelve hats cut out and ready for the machine.
Now I just need a bit of inspiration for embellishing them, as they’re rather plain at the moment. I read over on Betz White’s blog that you can use paper cutting tools on felt, so I thought I might give the paddle punches (assuming I can find them!) a try with fleece and see what happens.
I confirm that you can use a rottary cutter and a cutting mat to cut fabric. I bought these tools for quilting class, and I found out that it saves lot of time to use them for any sewing project, compared to the method I used before. The main limit is the thickness of all fabric layers, mainly for fleece and other thick fabrics. The limit comes from the width of the cutter blade. You already work very fast, I can’t wait to see how faster you could go with it.
I bought one of the little punch things to use with felt as I am hopeless at cutting out circles, but I have no idea where it is. My mum has a silhouette machine, so I need to see if I can use felt with that.