A Pincushion!

So I kinda botched my plan to make use of Saturday and go to the farmers market, do loads of things...instead, I slept until noon. I hate when I do that. On Sunday, though, I made a two-hour pincushion! Out of scraps!

Note the vast quantities of yellow fabric in the background.

Isn't it darling?

Square enough.

You may remember the chameleonic wool from my red hosen...to my eyes, it reads much more on the blue-burgundy end of the spectrum, but obviously my camera sees a more brick red. (Also, it was mid-afternoon and my window faces west, so the light was extremely yellow.) I'd meant to turn these scraps into a little belt purse for SCA purposes, but I didn't account for probably wanting to be able to stash my phone in the purse, and it would have been too small by a fraction of an inch. Instead, I chopped them into squares(ish) to turn into a roundish-squarish pincushion (geometry is really not my strong point in math—in fact there's a post coming fairly soon that will illustrate this fact—and I have no idea what you call the solid you get by connecting two squares along their perimeters point-to-edge).

I had no idea if this was going to work, but by god I was gonna try it.

The first seam was super easy: just a straight seam with the point of one square aligned with the center of the side of the other, stopping at the same point (but inverted).

It's working!!

Then, I folded the top square of fabric to align the second half of its first side with the first half of the lower square's second side (placing the point of the lower square at the middle of the upper square's side). And just...kept going. About halfway around, I could tell that my clever plan was going to work, because I was getting a sort of turtle-shaped object for my efforts.

Very carefully did not sew up that last side.

I kept going, using a plain old running stitch, until I had one half-side left open, and stopped there, but left my needle and thread attached.

Thrums! I couldn't bear to throw them away at the end of class.

I sliced through all the knots remaining in the thrums from my blanket (yes, I do know I've been holding out on real photos of it. It's technically not done yet) so there wouldn't be hard lumps in my pincushion...

A metaphorical representation of me after going for Indian food.

And stuffed the living daylights out of it. Really. I was afraid I'd burst a seam or tear a hole right through the fabric, it was so full, and I had very little room to work with for doing up the final seam.

Yes, it did feel like I was making a baseball.

I used a ladder stitch to do up the final seam, tucking stray bits of wool and the seam allowances in as I went, and then decided I ought to reinforce the rest of the seaming, so continued ladder stitching all the way around.

Spot the seam!

And then I had a roughly decahedral solid! Which was very...plain. And very dense. You could in fact use it like a baseball in a backyard game for some time before it would deform unusably.

This photo makes my stitching look both even and attractive, of which things it was neither.

I tried a feather stitch at first, using some leftover plied silk I'd stashed away from making my first ceinture and garters, but it was clumsy and rather more reminiscent of a baseball than I'd thought it would be. Density and general size aside, I don't have any real interest in my sewing tools resembling sports equipment.

Much better.

So I picked out the feather stitch and tried a simple chain stitch with doubled thread, just over the seam, which I like much better. Even though I impaled myself (twice) to do it. Surface embroidery on near-spherical objects is not for the faint-hearted, nor the thin-skinned.

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