Made The First Seam For My Curtains
[ Monday January 9th 2023 at 6:30 pm ]
The next big project I am undertaking is sewing black out curtains. This will help me sleep better at night. So much of my quality of life is tied into this.
I just used my sewing machine to create the first seam on curtain #1. Curtain #1 was always going to be rough. I am not use to sewing thick cloth. There is a high amount of learning involved in this.
Overall my plan is to sew nature scenes over top of the cloth that provides the sunlight blocking function. I've encountered two problems that I need to grow my skills before I make the remainder of the curtains.
- The first problem I've run into is that I need to support the cloth as it passes through the sewing machine. It is heavy enough that the sewing machine is struggling to feed the cloth through by itself. The stitches aren't forming correctly on account of this. This is easy enough to address. This amounts to sewing about 10cm and then repositioning the cloth.
- I've realized I need to use significantly more sewing pins. I am going to need a sewing pin about every 3cm to keep the cloth in alignment with itself.
- I am going to need the use of my hydraulic press to seat the 50mm grommets I purchased for the curtains to hang by. I've put metal grommets into cloth in the past. There is significantly more forgiveness with the smaller sizes. The tool for seating the 50mm size grommet requires even pressure to be applied.
- I needed to tweak the tension and stitch setting on my sewing machine to be compatible with the cloth. I wasn't off by much using my test piece of cloth. This has been the easiest to address of the lessons I've learned.
Now that I have a sense of what is involved I will need to think about when I am able to commit the time to this. With my hot water heater breaking I've realized I need to physically rest and recover before doing this. I need to be able to pay attention to the process of sewing.