Thursday, October 18, 2012

Sewing origami.

Let's talk cold today. It's obvious that now is the right season to go hunting for one. And I did. Just on weekend I managed to catch it without a gun, traps, dogs or any other trouble. At first I didn't admit that I'm sick and cold is in my hands, doing whatever it pleases. It shivered me, didn't let to sleep at night, wanted to play tickling my throat, raising my temperature (a bit). I really did try to ignore it like an annoying pet. Didn't work. It went uncontrollably wild. What else it was to do, then to become an onion of clothes to avoid it biting me, give it thyme tea and honey that without noticing I could sneak some cold medicine in. Finally it started to surrender. Leash is on and I'm almost good (I'm still angry that it ruined my plans to go and have flu vaccination but it can wait).
Now we can talk about something else. For example warmer wardrobe for a phone. Not mine though. Gift again. I suppose this year gifts' main theme is warmth and no for cold. Why I chose to make a phone case? It was no brainer. I used to have one and still remember that I liked it, because I didn't have to worry putting my phone anywhere were keys, coins and other stuff causing scratching were. For perfectionists like me it was ideal. But gift wasn't about me. Everyone has a phone (or two) so I thought I couldn't go wrong. I kind of miss having a phone case so probably I need to make one just for myself too (we all know how long it will take, because a shoemaker usually is without shoes).


The next step which I knew was that I wanted to make it from the leather and stitch something on the back. What could it be? I couldn't think of something clever at first so went for a walk into the magic fields of my inspiration folder (where I save all nice pictures from internet, some people call it stealing) and the search engines. I traveled for a while intensely thinking and decided that to put an umbrella on would be good and to put three of them it would be just simply great.


I got to work, sketched several little fellows on paper, cut them out and drew on the leather, selected the color of my threads. Here I have one rule - I stitch not on the correct measured and cut out pieces but only on measured and do the cutting after the stitching because you need to recheck your measurements again, leather tends to stretch out where you stitch it.



6-7 hours and few holes and needle marks in fingers later I finished all umbrellas and started drawing lines for the cover, cutting the leather, preparing lining. When everything was tacked together I thought all is good and I was sooo clever and had it figured out... you get the picture that I was proud and happy with myself. But when I sat down at my sewing machine and almost every line was sewed together I realize that I was just one step from crucial mistake and I wasn't so clever after all. I thought if I sew leather together from the inside (bad side) and sew together lining also from inside and sew each with the other everything will be just perfect, because then I just need to turn the good side out. I realized that here my origami thinking went wrong. There was no possibility to put the good side out because everything would be sewed together. I need one stitch unfinished to be able to turn the good side out. Aha. I did it right. 


When all was done I was left just with one thing - a fastener. In order phone not to loose its new and almost shiny outfit I needed to use a metal clip. But when I was sewing it on one clever man asked me 'Aren't you afraid that it will brake or scratch the screen because of every time you pushing it to clasp?'. It was Homer Simpson's 'D'oh!' moment. I didn't think of that. So I started to search other method to hook it up and this method was to take small pieces of velcro tape instead. It worked, everything looked good and I was happy of how it turned out.   

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