The other day, I made a terrible discovery. Some fabric I’d bought for a large-scale project wasn’t actually 100% cotton; it was some kind of blend of cotton and polyester. Outrageous, and upsetting.
There’s no point in making a baby quilt — or any kind of quilt, really, out of polyester. Actually, there’s not much that you can make out of a bunch of half-assembled polyester squares at all. It’s villainous stuff: it doesn’t sew well (or at least, I can’t make it behave well under the sewing machine); stitches come undone fairly easily, and it doesn’t stay pretty for long.
So, I found myself debating what to do with all these pre-cut squares and pinwheels. As an experiment, I made a komebukuro, and tried out the buttonhole-foot on my sewing machine.
Yeah… no. This isn’t a good use for my useless fabric, either. The bag is pretty enough, I guess… but the buttonhole foot doesn’t much like making button holes in polyester. And already, almost even before I finished stitching the eighth button hole, I found some of the quilting stitches were coming undone.
So I have a gift bag, which I’ll give away in the next two days or so, and someone will figure out how to pass it on. I’ll do a bunch of these sorts of things, these experiments, trying to figure out how to use up this fabric. But I’m growing less enthused every time I work with this fabric.
