The past two weeks have been all about boxes and stuff. And boxes and boxes of even more stuff. Egh! After almost six months of newlywededness, Jimmy and I finally called the movers in and had them move me out of my little Oakland condo and into our freshly remodeled Alameda home.

Moving gets tiring real fast, so it was a welcomed relief when I finally got to start in on making a new set of Big Lugs yesterday!

This set contains 12 Lugs and will therefore be the biggest number of Lugs I’ve attempted to produce in one run. There are 7 different styles/colors involved, so I see a lot of thread changing in my future…but this could not be helped. Actually, I hope to procure either a new Janome 1600P-DBX or Juki TL-98Q sometime in the near future to speed me along. Now that would help. Though, the funds are not quite there at the moment. Maybe after this set of 12 Lugs!?!

Lastly, I love picking up great tips - big or small - on how to improve sewing accuracy and efficiency. Kathleen Fasanella is chock full of these. She is the author of super-blog Fashion-Incubator.com and the book The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Sewn Product Manufacturing, which I bought in repayment for eating up all the free info on her site. My favorite blog entries related to preparing pieces for sewing are these little treasures:

• To pin or not to pin
• Tracing and marking
• Marking and cutting
• Rotary cutters, a guaranteed argument

Her material is focused mostly on industrial vs. home/hobby sewing, and though I may be but a one-gal shop I’m still a “manufacturing” business and think it’s essential to incorporate these recommended techniques, where they can apply, at home. For instance - pinning my fabric before cutting. This is, generally, a no-no. Kathleen demonstrates that pinning the pattern piece to the fabric before cutting creates waves in the fabric such that the piece, when cut,unpinned and flattened, turns out longer than a piece that’s unpinned. Oops. For handbags this is not such a big deal, but I have noticed this effect on smaller pieces of fabric.

On the other hand, it’s kinda gratifying when I find that I’m already doing things the recommended way, such as weighting my pattern down and tracing around it before cutting, or removing the pattern before using a rotary cutter. Good job, self.

Well, time to head over to the condo to meet the painter. Later today - on to cutting the linings/pockets/etc!

Related content:

• Back in action
• Moving and purging
• Lurkin’ Leopards!

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