Fun With Piping

I have most of the accessories for my Bernina serger, including the XL Piping Foot. Piping is easy to make on the serger and I prefer to do it that way because it keeps the fabric from fraying. Smaller piping is made using the small and large piping feet, but Bernina has an XL foot that allows for jumbo piping using 6, 8, or 10mm cord.

For fun—because I can—I decided to make some 10mm piping for the crazy quilt pillow. I cut black-and-white striped fabric on the bias using the Accuquilt cutter. Gail Yellen has a wonderful video demonstrating how to use the XL piping foot, so I followed her instructions to set it up.

It took just a few minutes to make enough piping for the pillow. I still have to make the pillow back, but I’ve got the piping clipped in place:

I am hoping to finish this pillow today. I need to get some projects crossed off the list before I start anything else. The problem is that I have so many ideas. 🤯

I set up the 700 PRO yesterday, too, although I didn’t have time to play with it. My next mastery class isn’t until September 8, which gives me some time to go up that learning curve. The Bernina We All Sew website features many free projects designed to help sewists—and teachers who have to teach these classes—learn new techniques. I think I might make some of the embroidered pincushion projects.

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It is very windy here this morning. The wind changed direction last night and is coming out of the east, back off the mountains. Hopefully, no trees will come down. We’ve been up since 3:30 am because the husband is pouring at 6:00 am and had to be at the jobsite bright and early. I’ve got a long list of tasks I want to tackle today, but I also have a podcast interview to record at 11:00 am.

I feel like I fell down on the gardening stuff this summer. Part of that was my schedule—I chaired the plant sale at the very end of May, then June was stuffed full of meetings and big events right when I should have been planting and tending to the garden. I want to get as much prepped this fall as possible so I don’t have to do it next spring. I need to prune out this year’s bearing canes from the raspberry patch. If the husband has time, I’d like to have him bring the track loader out to the garden to do some leveling and to plow under a couple of rotted stumps. The area where I am growing tomatoes this year needs to have the black plastic pulled up so we can amend the soil with rotted straw and pig manure.

Every year is different, and this year just wasn’t a big production year.