Sewing Room Fabric-Trimmed Towels – Complimentary Tutorial

Posted on September 5, 2016September 6, 2016 by Amanda Murphy

Hi everyone,

I hope you have been having a lovely Labor Day weekend. I’ve been trying to catch up on things over the past couple of days and one of the things I’ve been wanting to do is write up a tutorial for how to make these simple, fabric-trimmed files featuring my Sewing Room collection for Benartex and my coordinating embroidery collection for OESD. Of course, these instructions will work for any collection/fabric combination, but these are near and dear to my heart, of course!

These make great fits for your sewing friends and are really simple to make. Ready to get started? (There is a PDF link at the bottom of this post for your convenience.)

You’ll need:

Dish Towel – I like ones with a smooth texture so that the embroidery pops! I got mine from a great store in Brentwood, TN called BERNINA Sewing Machine Station.
Fabric Trim – 1 fat quarter or even less (see instructions below)
Stabilizer – Cut-away for a lightweight towel or tear-away for a heavier weight towel
Cotton Thread 50 wt. to match fabric
Edgestitching Foot – Optional but highly recommended
Embroidery Thread and Temporary Spray Adhesive.

Preparing the Fabric Trim

Wash and dry your towel as you would for every day use. Press well. Measure your towel. (After washing mine was about 17-1/2’’ x 25-1/2’’.)

Decide how wide you would like the band of fabric trim to be. (In these examples mine were 3’’ wide.) Multiply this width times 2 and add in 1/2’’ for seam allowance. This measurement will be the height of the fabric rectangle. Add 1’’ to the width of the towel width. This measurement will be the width of the fabric rectangle. Cut the fabric rectangle using the measurements above.. (My fabric rectangles were 18-1/2’’ s 6-1/2’’.) If you have a directional fabric, make sure to orient it when cutting in the manner you like best. Join the long edges of the fabric rectangle right sides together using a 1/4’’ seam allowance and back-stitching at each end. Press the seam open. Turn the tube right side out and press again so that the seam is centered somewhere on the back of the strip and the motifs you like best are in the front.

Embroidery

Next, prepare your towel for embroidery by marking the embroidery’s center point. In this example, I placed three of the Sewing Room dress embroideries side by side on my BERNINA 780, spacing them evenly. Converting the mm size given to inches I found that my embroideries would measure approximately 6-1/2’’ in width x 3-1/2’’ in height. To find the vertical center of the embroideries on the towel, divide their height in half and add in the height of your fabric band (shown by the white dashed line below) and 1-1/2’’ of buffer space (shown by the green dashed line below). Use your quilting ruler to mark that measurement from the towels bottom edge (shown by the teal line below). You really don’t need to make the green or white lines – they are just shown for your information. Make the vertical center of the towel.

Hoop your stabilizer. Spray the back of your towel with a bit of temporary spray adhesive and use the grid that came with your hoop to align the cross hairs you’ve drawn on the towel with the center of the hoop.

Attach the hoop onto the machine and make any necessary placement adjustments to make sure the cross hairs are right in the center of your design. Direct the machine to run a basting stitch around the design area and embroider a the Sewing Room design onto the towel.

Unhoop and cut or tear away the stabilizer. If you used a water-soluble marking pen to mark the center be sure to remove the marks before ironing the towel!!! (Ask me how I know!)

Fabric Trim Application

Turn edges of the fabric trim tube in so that the tube exactly fits with width of the towel. Press. Pin onto the towel. Use an edge stitching or piping foot and matching thread to top-stitch the fabric trim to the bottom of the towel.

That’s it! You can find a link to a PDF version of this tutorial right here or on my downloads page.

Have a lovely Labor Day!

Amanda

Sewing Room!

Posted on July 24, 2016August 20, 2016 by Amanda Murphy

Hi everyone,

It has been a busy couple of months here and I can finally talk about all the secrets I’ve been keeping all this time. At BERNINA University this past week I debuted a brand new collection for Benartex – Sewing Room! This one is close to my heart as a BERNINA Spokesperson because it has my very favorite sewing machines!

Although the collection is available to quilt shops everywhere, the SKUs with the BERNINA logo are only available to BERNINA dealers. If you like the collection please ask your quilt shop to give Benartex a call.

Patterns are just starting to ship this week to distributorsand are also on my website. Of course, if you can order from your local shop please do so – shops are the heart of our industry and we want them to stay in business!

First up is a new pieced block-of-the-month pattern called Sewing Room Sampler. It is my favorite pattern ever I think because it was such fun to sew and to quilt. (I quilted it on my BERNINA Q 24 and I’ll be talking about how I did so in my Facebook group later in the year.) It is a larger pattern than my usual patterns – 16 pages full-color. Shop owners can find the shop guide for this sampler here.

Next up is “S is for Sew”. It is a fun project that incorporates appliqué and basic piecing. It comes with a download code with embroidery files for “in-the-hoop appliqué”, cutwork files and SVG files if you’d like to digitally cut your fabric so it is something new for me. I also have a new Aurifil thread collection that I’m really excited about that allows you to try appliqué with the 28 wt. thread I love for a reasonable price. (More on that at the bottom of this post.)

The third pattern is called “Sewing Garden”. It is a simple pieced design made from two stacks of 10” squares.

I also have two Aurifil thread collections which I’m really excited about, both of which coordinate with not only Sewing Room, but with all of my collections so far. The first is great for piecing and quilting – it contains 11 large spools of 50 wt.

The smaller thread collection is perfect for appliqué! I love to use thicker thread for my appliqué, so it contains 8 spools of 28 wt. in a range of colors for blanket and specialty stitches and two spools of 12 wt. to use for the triple stitch and/or to mimic (or actually do if you are brave!) hand embroidery. Aurifil is having a giveaway over on their blog for this one so check it out!

Next month I’ll be coming out a coordinating Sewing Room Quilting Collection as well for long arms and embroidery machines, similar to my Feathers & Flourishes Quilting Collection, which just started shipping as well.

There is also a coordinating embroidery collection available from OESD. I’ll post pictures of that soon!

I hope you are enjoying your summers – happy quilting!

Amanda

Feathers & Flourishes Complimentary patterns

Posted on June 26, 2016June 26, 2016 by Amanda Murphy — Leave a comment

Hi everyone,

Well the word is that Feathers & Flourishes is starting to ship to shops – YAY! So excited to see what you make with this line!

The free patterns that go with this collection are now available for download. The first is called Cinema and is a 2-1/2”-strip-friendly bargello quilt reminiscent of 1920s design.

I have to brag for a minute – my daughter quilted most of this one using rulers on the BERNINA Q24! Proud mom!

The second pattern is called Evolutions and is a re-release of a pattern formerly in my line that was just perfect for this collection. (The blue version is in a box on its way to BERNINA University and I forgot to snap a picture of it so I’ll have to show you that one later. Special thanks to Jo Anne and Traci for helping with these!)

You can get this and all of my free patterns on my download page. This includes the free pattern for the Feathers and Flourishes Embroidered Runner, which utilizes the OESD embroidery collection but also would work well by simply fussy-cutting centers from the medallion print from this collection.

FF_embroidery — “Feathers & Fourishes” embroidered runner

You can get the other patterns that go with this collection in my shop or, better yet, please consider asking your local quilt shop to order them. The local shops are the lifeblood of this industry and we want them to do well!

If you make something and have an instagram account please post to Instagram with the #amandamurphydesign and @amandamurphydesign labels – my user name is AMANDAMURPHYDESIGN.

Have a lovely weekend with lots of sewing!

Amanda