Sew Mama Sew's Bluefig Challenge

I am excited to share with you Emily's newest project!

Emily and I participated in Sew Mama Sew's Bluefig challenge this week. Bluefig is a Washington-based company that sells, among other things, ready-to-sew kits for kids 6 and older. Their Bluefig University sewing kits cater to three learning levels, and contain ready-cut pieces of felt for kids to stitch into bags and other accessories. 

We picked a kit from the advanced level age range (8 and older) 

to make a little duffle bag about 12" long and 6" across at the ends.

The kit was designed to help kids (or adult users) learn new skills as they assembled the project. Here is a description of the techniques involved in making this bag:

Here are the contents of the kit -

pre-cut parts of a bag in thick felt. 

The zipper came with its ends prepped with pre-sewn fabric tabs.

Also included was an instructional booklet. Video instructions were suggested but they were unavailable on the Bluefig website at the time we were working on our project.

Here are some sample pages. This is the introduction section, explaining right and wrong sides (which were denoted throughout the instructions as grey vs white instead of the text notation of RS and WS).

Here are two sample pages of instructions.

Emily, who's eleven, worked on the bag over the weekend. Because she is comfortable at the sewing machine, and has independently completed many projects, including this patchwork ball, she made the bag almost entirely without my help. 

She does not always sew on the floor, incidentally!

First, the zipper was installed. The choice of felt made it unnecessary to fiddle with raw edges and lining layers - this step was simply sewing two straight seams to attach the zipper to the WS of the two main body pieces.

Next, Emily folded the middles of the straps and sewed two rectangular outlines to make comfortable-width grips. 

Then, she appliqued a decorative patch to the body of the bag with zig-zag stitch. This was the first time she'd attempted this technique, and she was very excited to learn it. After this, she edge-stitched the straps onto the bag.

Here are the handle grips.

This next bit was the most challenging part of the construction process - attaching the circular ends. It is challenging even for experienced non-kid seamstresses! I helped Emily pin the two fabric layers pieces together at the ends, and showed her how to measure and match the quarter marks (which the instructions did not include). She then sewed the two circular ends onto the main body of the bag.

Finally, it was time to turn everything right side out!

The kit came with an additional fabric shape for embellishing the bag, and Emily hand-stitched that onto one of the straps.

We are both proud of how it turned out! Emily took her Lil' Duffle bag to school with her to show her friends today.

Here are our thoughts on the kit:

1  We appreciated that the pieces were pre-cut, so we could get to the actual assembly right from the start. The instruction booklet provided dimensions for the pre-cut pieces, which Emily thought she could refer to for making duplicates of this bag in the future.

2  We loved the materials. The felt was of a good thickness and overall quality. Felt is a smart choice for kids' and beginners' projects because with it, one doesn't need to deal with right vs wrong sides, fraying edges or accurate stitching lines for specified seam allowances. This, in turn, eliminates the need for a bag lining, or for binding the seam allowances on the inside of the project. While these are all useful and necessary techniques for bagmaking with more traditional materials, kids (and beginners) are often more than happy to skip these if it means finishing a project in less time.

3  We found that the instructions, while accompanied with annotated diagrams, were not adequate for a child to follow without additional help by someone more experienced in making similar projects. This should have been indicated in the kit, especially since it was easy for users to assume, as we did, that we would be learning the techniques as we followed the directions. Some of the phrasing was vague and/or awkward, so that I had to re-interpret certain steps for Emily, who found the text instructions inconsistent and confusing. 

As an example, the last step - in which the circular piece was attached to the end opening of the tubular body - is, as mentioned, a fiddly technique even for adults, and easily results in puckers, slipping, or misaligned seams, particularly with fabric as thick and stiff as this felt. Emily experienced all of these, which we then corrected after I'd demonstrated alternative ways to do this step.

We felt that more detailed instructions or, at least tips for success, would have helped considerably with the trickier steps, such as this one.

4  It was a pity that the video instructions mentioned in the package were not currently available. Children, especially, find live demonstration very helpful, much more than pictorial instructions. Hopefully the videos will be made available soon - they will certainly add to the ease of the assembly process.

5 I contacted the staff at Bluefig with my questions and feedback and they were prompt and gracious in their response.

Thank you, Bluefig and Sew Mama Sew for this opportunity to try out your kit! Other participants will be sharing their experience with the Bluefig U sewing challenge throughout this week. Please visit them here:

Alicia Brown of Felt With Love Designs

Kristy of Simply This Life

Cheri Paxton of Living DIY Style

Rae Ann Kelly

Vanessa Lynch of Punkin Patterns

Disclaimer: We received the Bluefig University Lil' Duffle Sewing Kit free in conjunction with Sew Mama Sew's Bluefig Challenge in exchange for an honest review.

Chasing The Light

This is going to be one of those Before-After stories.

If you've followed my blog for a while, you might have deduced that I am not very good with lighting in my photos. By that, I mean that I am happy as a lark on overcast days and I can be outdoors on the deck with the camera, but whenever I have to be indoors (like half the year when it's blizzard season), I mope and whine and use words like "dungeon" and "black hole" am generally very hard to live with.

Like all organisms under duress, I developed very complex coping strategies.

Here's one: Chasing Sunlight Method 1:
LiEr runs from window to window, trying to find the best spot in the living room where there is sunlight but no shadows. The running is necessary because of the wind - as the wind blows, the backyard trees move, and the leaves make shifting, dappled patterns of light and shadow.
Unfortunate side effect: frantic shoving of furniture and other items aside, including people, just to get the perfect spot for all of two seconds.

Here's another: Chasing Sunlight Method 2
LiEr only takes photos before breakfast and just before suppertime. This is the time when the sun is cooperating in a photoshoot-worthy manner by being just dim enough that there are no harsh shadows and still sufficiently bright that you don't need giant apertures that make everything look grainy.
Unfortunate side effect: the family starves because prime photo time sadly coincides with cooking times, and obviously stomachs can wait while the sun can't.

Here's one more: Chasing Sunlight Method 3
LiEr takes photos only in the spring and summer, because that's when the wind also behaves in a photoshoot-worthy manner. Autumn has beautiful warm light most of the day but also dreadful gales that make taking photos of anything lighter than an anvil a joke. And winter . . . well. Winter is just bad for photographing anything but evergreens, glaciers and wolves. 
Unfortunate side effect: For about 5 months of the year, craft production can happen. The other 7 months, not so much.

Finally: Chasing Sunlight Method 4
LiEr gives up and sits in the dark basement with small photo lamps, weeping.
Unfortunate side effect: everything.

It would be tragic if it weren't so stupid, is what I kept telling myself. I mean, it's hard to indulge in self-pity and blame the cosmos (or just the sun, really) when you already are aware of how pathetic you are. The people who love me and live with me and who were deprived of meals at the appropriate times, decided that enough was enough, and set about helping me fix my sad life.

First, we researched light boxes. Everyone knows that light boxes are a boon to photographers, even those among us who don't fancy themselves as real photographers. But for some reason, we don't use them. Myself included.

Some of us (again, myself included) decide to make their own. Because it's cardboard (reason enough) and because it's cheap, and because there are tutorials all over the internet.

Now, the kind of photography that craft people do is size-specific. We shoot close-ups of things like seams and topstitching, so a small light box is perfect, especially if we already have small photo lamps and not a whole lot of space in our homes for anything larger. And, if our finished projects are also tiny, like miniature clay cupcakes, we're all set.

However, some of us make larger items, like cardboard castles and entire dresses and enormous stuffed animals and bags that need to be suspended from a hook. For those, a large light box is more versatile. Sadly, to sufficiently illuminate a large light box, one also needs large lamps, otherwise it's just another dungeon, only in cardboard.

It can get complicated, as you might have guessed. Which is why so many of us just give up and say, "The sun is the best. It's huge and perfect and shines everywhere (if you're lucky enough not to have backyard trees) and works for tiny things and big things. I'll just wait for a sunny day to take photos! Meanwhile, I won't sew! I'll just procrastinate and read books and eat chocolate!"

This faulty logic is at the heart of many an underachieving seamstress-blogger, friends. I speak from personal experience.

So, light boxes.

I made one last year (and forgot to blog about it).

I went out and bought the largest cardboard box I could find that I could reasonably fit in our store room.

Then I cut big windows out of three sides, sat it on its fourth side for a base,

and cut away the top flaps to make a front opening.

Then I bought two cheap poster boards and taped them end-to-end (overlapping) so they were together long enough to drape across the back wall and floor of the box.

Finally, I bought cheap white muslin and glued it over the cut-out windows. This is to make incoming light diffuse and even, without shadows or bright spots.

It's also to reflect light within the box to make your subject as bright as possible.

Here is the light box illuminated from the inside to show how diffuse the light will be over the entire window square, even though it's coming from a point source bulb. Obviously, when you use this light box, you'd place the lamp outside it, and preferably have one lamp shining through each of the three windows.

Here is what the lamp arrangement might look like, minus the box. There are lots of shadows around the subject. Ideally, in the light box, the fabric will diffuse and reflect the light and reduce these shadows.

Here's a shot I took indoors without the light box, in regular sunlight coming in through the windows. Not good, but better than with just the bare lamps. Daylight, even if fickle, is still better than dungeon-lighting, was my philosophy.

Here is that same shot, cropped.

Here is a peacock shot in the cardboard lightbox.

Indoors, with homemade light box and small photo lamps

compared to:

Outdoors, natural light

And here is another shot taken in the lightbox.

Indoors, with homemade light box and small photo lamps

Here is that same shot, taken indoors with daylight.

Indoors, with natural light through the window

Verdict: I thought the homemade light box did well. Three cheers for homemade light boxes! 

So, do still I use my homemade light box?

Sadly, no. It is now a storage box for the Menagerie animals. 

Reasons:

It is huge. It's hard to store and lug upstairs and downstairs and outdoors and wherever photoshoots need to happen. I had grand plans to make it collapsible and everything, but it's just not sturdy enough to continually hinge and fold and unfold. Also, it's not fun to keep setting up lamps whenever I want to take a picture of something. Finally, in spite of it being the largest box I could buy, it's still not large enough for many of my finished projects, and especially not large enough for me to take bird's-eye angles of things. 

Instead, this is what I now use -

- an actual, fold-up light tent. That black bag is how small it folds up for storage, including the various backdrops that come with it. 

I use it both with and without the front panel - there's a slit for inserting my camera (and arm) if I want even the front wall to be closed, white and reflective. This morning, I popped it open on our deck and took photos with just the sunlight that filtered through the foliage of our trees. 

Indoors or outdoors, the sunlight - with or without harsh shadows, dappled shade or not - gives happy pictures. 

Natural light, no light tent

Natural light, in light tent

Here is one with a dark backdrop:

Indoors, natural light, light tent.

And here are some against with a white backdrop - both from the front and top:

Natural light, in light tent

Natural light, in light tent

Natural light, in light tent

We also worked out a way to actually get more light indoors where I work, and to make it easy to take photos while working. We installed daylight lamps with reflectors as work lamps over my sewing table. This way, I can also use the light tent indoors with artificial daylight after sunset, or just do tutorial shots under the daylamps on my table itself.

I hope this has been helpful for those of you who share my lighting woes. If I can take photos in natural light, I will, simply because it's an excuse to be outdoors and sunlight is truly beautiful, especially just before sunset. But if I can't, the light tent/light box option is a wonderful alternative, even allowing me to do midnight photo-shoots in my PJs if I need to. Make one yourself (there are many other tutorials on the internet) if you don't want to buy a fold-up one, and if storage isn't an issue. 

At the very least, I recommend two amazing photo tools to everyone: a 50 cent white poster board (I got mine at the dollar store, and replace it whenever it gets ratty),

Here's how I use it:

Cropped, and with its exposure upped slightly with a photo-editor.

For larger subjects than will fit on that poster board, I use this $3.99 IKEA fleece blanket.