PaleGray Labs Archives - Page 7 of 7

Davis Vertical Feed restoration

Davis_before_2 — I got this Davis Vertical Feed 2 on eBay for $30 (plus shipping). It arrived full of gunk and rust, barely moving, and smelling of smoke.

Davis_partswasher — Getting a bath in the Parts Washer

Davis_submerged — Submerged in kerosene overnight

Davis_gunk — Soaked in kerosene and wiped but still full of gunk.

EvapoRust bath — After cleaning what we could with kerosene and brass brushes, we soaked everything the following night in Evapo-Rust.

after evaporust — This morning we retrieved each piece, wiped it off, rinsed in water, wiped, rinsed in acetone, wiped, and revaled beautiful clean shiny parts.

reassembling — Then we put everything back together, with liberal squirts of sewing machine oil.

restored Davis VF — Success! Here she is installed in my Minnesota A cabinet. She works great.

Davis VF walking foot — Here's the reason I bought and spent 3 days restoring her: the walking foot. I need this "vertical feed" system to sew bindings on quilts. The Minnesota A made too many random pleats and crumples.

Blogger’s Quilt Festival – “Ziz” quiltimation in Art Quilts

Approximately 32″ square. Cotton fabric, cotton/bamboo batting, rayon thread. Machine embroidery, quilting, trapplique.

I’m submitting this in Art Quilts because there’s no “animation” category in the Blogger’s Quilt Festival. 😉 I’m happy to have it in an online show, because you can easily see it animated:

Each block of the quilt is a frame in the animated cycle above. I created the animation, exported as vector images which Theo Gray stitchcoded in Mathematica. Each block was stitched in 2 parts on our embroidery machine: first the Ziz (gryphon) figure, then the background. I cut out and applied the former to the latter and the machine “trappliqued” it down and did the echo pattern. Finally I zigzag stitched the blocks together, topstitched homemade bias tape over the seams, and bound it.

Stitch me closer tiny dancer

Theo stitched the yesterday’s dancer outline with the background inverted to make a fill.

Embroidermation du jour: twirling dancer

Today’s embroidermation features a rotoscoped dance outtake performed by Reena Shah about 7 years ago for Sita Sings the Blues. Theo coded the stitches and the animated sin wave loop background. This is designed for larger quilts, but this version is tiny as it was stitched on our embroidery machine.

I sewed the 16 panels together like so:

The cycle is actually 13 frames long – an annoying number for animation. The final 3 frames are repeats so it could be a 4 x 4 square. Finished size is 16″ x 16″.

Crazy Sewing Machine Lady

I guess it’s happened – I’ve turned into a sewing machine collector. No one needs more than one sewing machine, but I just obtained my fifth. I’ve wanted a treadle machine since I started quilting a few years ago, and when I came across this beauty on Chicago’s Craigslist, I couldn’t resist.

She stitches! Came with one bobbin wound with ancient thread. No belt yet (I ordered one this morning) so I used the hand wheel. I’ve also ordered 2 additional bobbins, and some 100-year-old unused needles on eBay. I threaded the shuttle myself after reading up on it online. It’s a Davis, Long.

There were lots of dropped stitches and thread nests in the back, but as I adjusted the tension disc and whatever the screwpost thing on top is (foot pressure?) it got better. The machine was very well oiled before it was stored however many years ago. It moves pretty smoothly.

Officially this is a Channukah present from Theo. I’m a lucky gal.

PaleGray Labs

That’s what Theo Gray and I are calling our quilting/embroidery/stitchcoding/animation collaboration. PaleGrayLabs.com currently redirects to the “quilting” category of this blog, but hopefully it’ll get its own web site eventually. Mostly so we can use this logo I designed:

and that Theo stitchcoded: