A Forest of Serger Trees

The husband is home and I am officially off pig duty. It was breezy yesterday but we did not lose power and no trees came down. Temps have cooled off, too, which is lovely. Yesterday’s National Weather Service briefing from the Missoula office predicts thunderstorms and potential drenching rain for Monday and Tuesday. We’ll see what the Sunday briefing says.

I hit a minor impasse with the Glacier batik fabric project so I went as far as I could yesterday and set it aside. That gave me a chance to finish the Amanda Murphy table runner project. This is the pattern I thought might make a good class until I started working on the decorative chainstitching on the trees.

For all that the chainstitching was so tedious, the finished runner is gorgeous. This is one of those projects that I keep going back to look at because I think it’s so lovely. The runner still has to be basted with a backing and batting and the background quilted. Here is a closeup of one of the trees:

The chainstitching on the trees was done with metallic Glamore thread on my L890 serger. The trees and the background triangles were stitched together—wrong sides together—with a three-thread wide overlock stitch with silver Glamore thread in the upper looper, creating the decorative seam along the side of the tree. The seam was pressed to the side to show off the stitching and the thread.

The background fabric came out of the stash and I think it worked perfectly.

I might still decide to do this as a class. One change I would make is to enlarge the squares from which the trees are cut. If a person is going to go to all the trouble of chainstitching a square and then cutting it down into a triangle, why not make it big enough to cut TWO triangles out of it? That seems to me to be a bit more efficient, especially if making the table runner and the matching placemats.

Once the chainstitching was done and all the pieces were cut out, the assembly didn’t take that long. I doubt I’ll use this as a table runner, though. I think I am going to hang it up instead.

While I worked on this, I listened to the latest Threads Magazine podcast episode, which featured an interview with Kenneth D. King. I had the great fortune to take a trouser drafting class last October with Kenneth at the Sewing and Design School in Tacoma. (I still need to make some pants off that pattern . . .) I’m going to listen to this episode again because it was so full of wisdom. At one point, Kenneth said something along the lines of, “You have to burn through acres of fabric to acquire a base of knowledge”—I am paraphrasing—and that really resonated. It’s why I sew so much. I am trying to acquire that knowledge and build a broad base of sewing (and serging and quilting) techniques.

After I finished the table runner, I spent an hour cleaning and organizing. I am very organized in most areas of my life, but my sewing space always looks like a tornado went through it. I can’t work in a sterile, minimalist environment. I need a certain level of chaos to be creative. (Weird, huh?) Every so often, though, the chaos gets a bit out of control and has to be reined in. The decks have been cleared and I am ready to make some lists and prioritize my fall sewing projects.