Wednesday, April 9, 2014

I love shiny, happy things!

One of my favorite sites to visit is Pinterest because I love seeing all of the crafty, DIY tutorials out there. I became inspired to make a sequin word shirt. Basically, I took a plain tshirt, cut the neckline off, and the plan was to sew on sequins along a hand drawn word.

I wrote the word Love in cursive on the t-shirt and then I placed the string of sequins on the drawn line so I could see how it would look finished.

Sounds easy enough, right?
My carefully laid strung sequins

Except my Plan A involved hand sewing the string of sequins onto the front of the shirt. Two hours and twenty curse words later I gave up.

Plan B? I go to YouTube and look for videos on how to attach the sequins by machine. Lo and behold, I discover that there is such thing as a sequin foot. I go to my Baby Lock site, look for the part number, find it, verify that it IS compatible with my machine, and then I'm off looking for the foot. I find the foot and order it. When it arrives, I open it and... wait... WHAT?! It doesn't fit? It seems that the presser lever will not lift the presser foot high enough to get the foot under it to snap it in properly. I decide to improvise and lower my feed dogs and I can barely get the foot under it and it is really tight. I decide not to try the foot for fear that I may damage my machine. Instead, I write to the seller and to Baby Lock. The seller just tells me that I can return it if it cannot fit but Baby Lock tells me to go to my dealer. I still have the foot and I'm going to drop by the dealer when I get time to see what the problem is.

In the meantime, my project sits unfinished and abandoned until I can get more information on how to complete the shirt.

I have a feeling that the product, although advertised to be a Baby Look and Brother foot, may not truly be a Baby Lock foot and THAT is why it doesn't work. I posted a question on a Quilting Forum and someone suggested that it may be a Brother foot or may have been compatible with the older version of my machine.

Anyway, I just want to add that I follow a blog called All Things Schwin and I was excited to see that one of the posts was a DIY tutorial on making a sequin anchor shirt. It reminded me of my unfinished, neglected Love sequin shirt.

I'm going to try to attach my sequins using the All Things Schwin technique and see if that makes a difference.

Wish me luck!