• General,  Sewing/Quilting

    Tracing Wheels

    Tracing Wheels with Instructor Steve Butler Class 158 View at our website What is it? The genesis of almost everything we create when we sew begins with a pattern of some form. Fashion, fashion accessories, heirloom, purses and bags, quilts, home decor, they all use them. In our selection process we identify potential candidates from the perfectly posed pictures on the pattern packaging. The next step is to look at the pattern itself to get an idea of what it will take to complete that project. Some patterns are very complex while others are…

  • General,  Sewing/Quilting,  Tool School Extra Credit

    Extra Credit: Tracing Wheels

    Tracing Wheels By Shannon and Jason Medieval torture devices? Baking for making those cool cuts in the top of your bread? What exactly are those strange looking wheelie-pokey-thing-a-ma-bob-tools that come in sewing tool kits and why should I learn to use them? If your first exposure to tracing wheels brought up these questions, you aren’t alone. Tracing wheels are for, just that, tracing pattern pieces. The pointy, sharp tracing wheel is perfect for outlining an existing pattern piece to create a duplicate. In our case, we use it to duplicate…

  • General,  Session 21,  Sewing/Quilting

    Tailoring Tools

    What is it? – Open any catalog of sewing notions and you’ll immediately be overwhelmed. There are so many specialty tools with each designed to assist us in our various sewing tasks. But as the “specialty” moniker suggests, they often apply only to a specific niche (or even micro-niche) of a particular sewing operation. But what about the other sewing tools, the ones we use all of the time? What about those sewing notions that have expansive applications to a wide spectrum of sewing requirements? Take tailoring or dressmaking for example. What are the operations common to most…

  • Session 5,  Sewing/Quilting

    Tracing Wheels

    What is it? – The venerable tracing wheel.  The first one I ever saw was as a youngster looking through my grandmother’s sewing basket.  I thought it was there by mistake.  It was obviously a toy.  What could a stick and a wheel possibly have to do with sewing?  Fast forward a few decades and it is all clear to me now.  Not that I use it, I just have an appreciation of its use as a sewing tool.  Almost everything we construct when we sew uses a pattern at…