Laminates Session 6: Laminate Cotton Wallet

All right, I'm ready to make the version of this wallet with the laminated cotton. Now you see I have my pieces here, and they look a little bit different. This one's quite a bit longer than the one you have seen before, and there's no pockets, so, hmm, I wonder how this is gonna go together. It's because we're gonna construct this differently. Because there is a weave in the fabric here, this can fray even though there is a laminate on top of it. With time, it can fray, so we definitely don't want to leave a raw edge in this case. So I'm gonna put this one aside and you'll notice that you've also cut a piece of craft fuse here. So I want you to notice if you've never used craft fuse before that the shiny side here, can you see that shine on there, that is the glue side. This part needs to be on the back of the fabric, just like this. Okay? So, this is important. A lot of people feel like you can't fuse something to the back of a laminated cotton because of the heat of the iron, that you might melt it. So I actually have my iron all the way up on cotton here, and I'm just gonna be very careful. So now it's all about the timing. You want to make sure that you don't have the iron on there too long so that it melts the fabric. So my iron is nice and hot. I'm gonna put it down here and I'm gonna count to about 12 to 15 in my head. Okay, now the key to doing this is you have to have patience because this is still very hot. So you don't want to move to this section here because the iron could overlap on a piece of your laminated that's already hot and that could melt it. So you want to wait until it's nice and cool. So I'm gonna go ahead and move over here to this side, and I'm gonna do this little bit. Okay. All right. That's nice and hot. Look, you can tell already it's not coming up. That's so great. So now we have one more little bit to do, so let's just make sure that this cools a little bit nicely here. We're gonna go like this, get the last piece. All right, and then we're gonna wait for that to cool. I'm gonna move my iron out of my way here. And now when I turn it over, you will notice that I did not melt my laminate, which is fantastic, and now it's nice and stiff. Now, if I bend it a little bit, you can kind of see that there's some wrinkles in here where it didn't fuse all the way. That doesn't matter. Really, the whole point of this is this is such a soft material and it scrunches and bends really easily. So in the application of the wallet, we really want to give it a little more thickness and stiffness by adding a fusible webbing so that it's nice and thick and stiff. Okay, so now the next step is we are going to put the right sides together here, like this, and I'm just gonna put my side up. And it's difficult to line the edges up because the two pieces really kind of want to stick together. And I'm gonna move this press board out of the way. I don't need that anymore. And we are going to pin. Now, you saw how difficult it was to turn the vinyl right side out. This could be a little bit difficult to do that as well because it's so sticky. So we want to leave a nice, big hole on the side to turn this guy right side out. So I'm just gonna put two pins here and I'm gonna remember that I don't want to sew through that area. Now, this is nice and stiff, so I really don't need a whole lot of pins in here. So I'm just gonna do this right on the edge like this. And I'm just gonna make sure that all my edges are lined up nicely here. That looks pretty good. All right. And then remembering that this is my gap here, I am going to sew with a half-inch seam all the way around here. So I'm gonna bring my machine in. I'm gonna start at this one pin. Now this is more like traditional sewing. You've noticed we've put the right sides together. We're gonna use a half-inch seam all the way around. So this is something that is probably what you're more familiar with. Okay, so I need to do a back stitch. And I'll make my, hmm, stitch length a little longer, or sorry, a little smaller. I had it on three, remember? Because that's what we were using when we did the oil cloth, but this stuff moves a little bit better through the foot, so I'm gonna use the traditional sewing length, which is two and a half. Stop and turn my corner. And I'm gonna continue in this manner all the way around. All right, I'm turning my very last corner now, so I want to remember to stop at this pin. Once I'm there, I'm gonna pull the pin for safety, I'm gonna do my little backstitch. All right, now I can pull this out, trim my threads. I'm gonna pull all of our pins out. Now, before we turn this right side out we want to trim all of our corners. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna get our big scissors and we're going to trim off each of these corners. Now there's a couple ways to do this. You can just do it traditionally like this, notice that I did not cut the stitching. So you can do that, but then to get a better corner, you can even trim off a little more, like that. Okay, now we've got a real good angle on that. So I'm just gonna go ahead and do my two angles like this on this side, like that. Be sure not to cut the stitching. That will give you a hole, of course. All right. Now that we've got all of our corners trimmed it's time to find our hole, which is here, and we're going to wrestle this thing right side out. Okay, so now that we've got it, we really want to poke these corners out nicely. So sometimes if you're very careful, you can take a tool, such as this little ruler here, this seam gauge, and poke out those corners nice and neat, just like that. Get that guy out of there. We'll go all the way along. And you're just gonna continue in this manner until you have all of your corners, poked out nice and neat. All right, I have all of my corners poked out nice and neat just like that. And this looks wonderful except for it's all wrinkly, but you remember the ironing tips. Later I'm gonna put it on my ironing board, I'm gonna get the ironing board really hot, and then I'm gonna push this on top of the hot ironing board and smooth it out. But we also have a hole right here. That's just not fun. So let's tuck these in like this. Now, if you put your fingers just straight down and you kind of pull out like this, then you are able to get these to match up like so. And we are going to, once they're matched up perfectly, we are going to put a pin all the way along this edge. So remember the pin holes show, so you don't want to go too, too far into the fabric. You want to kind of stay right on the edge if you can. Let's get this guy lined up a little better. See again, everything is just kind of sticking together and being funny. You do have to have quite a bit of patience to work with this stuff. That's why it helps to have the correct tools for of the shortcuts that are available to you. That way it makes it a more enjoyable sewing experience. Okay, so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna top stitch or edge stitch around this entire thing. So I'm gonna bring my sewing machine over. And now I want to change to a top stitch length of three or three and a half. We're gonna go with three and a half. And I'm gonna tuck this under here. And I'm gonna stitch, I don't know, maybe an eighth of an inch away from the edge? It's pretty much up to you where your top stitch goes, but just remember right here where you've got your opening that you're going to sew later, you want to make sure that you don't go more than a half an inch because then it won't close your opening. All right, let's get this guy lined up. And we don't have to backstage till the end, so I'm not gonna do a back stitch when I start. Now you can see, this is extremely sticky. You can even hear it a little. It's sticking to everything. But the wonderful part of this walking foot is that it's helping it right along and my stitch length looks great. Whoo! See how I'm stuck a little bit there? Watch this. I'm just stuck a little bit. So I'm just gonna lift and I'm gonna wiggle and I'm gonna scoot it forward. Once the teeth bite into it, then it'll really move. All right, I'm all the way back to the beginning. I'm gonna drive over where I started and then do a back stitch. And now I can pull out my piece. And it looks like a little mat. So if you made this bigger, you would have place mats. Hey! So you can make them any size you want. Sew them right sides together, flip it right side out, and you have yourself a place mat. But we're gonna get a little fancier than that today. So you can see that I have all of my edges top stitched, just like this. Now we are going to reproduce, let me grab this guy so you can kind of see where we're going with this. We've got some pockets right here from our other one, right? We are just gonna simply fold these over like this to create those pockets. So we want to make sure we measure them correctly. This should be three inches. This needs to scoot back just a little bit. Once we've got our three-inch fold, we can stick a pin in the side, just like this, to hold that pocket into place. We'll do the same on this side. Or use a piece of blue tape around the side, hmm? Now that you know the tricks. And then we want to fold this one in three inches, as well. That was a good guesstimate. All right. I'm gonna pin this into place. And this one as well. Now what we're going to do is we're just gonna stitch the sides right here. So I'm just gonna get right on this top stitch, I'm gonna do a little back stitch, sew down here, back stitch. I'm gonna sew this one, this one, this one, and this one. Bring my machine on over here. Get this under here. All right now, if you think about it, we have one, two, three, four layers, but really there's eight layers 'cause we're sewing through the seam allowances. So let's see how this walking foot does. That is a lot of thickness and there was no stick at all. Now we've got one side secured. I'm gonna go ahead and do that with the other three. All right, I'm just finishing up with my last side. We'll trim our threads. And we'll remove our pins. And now you can see that we've got pockets under here with the laminated cotton, just the same as we made with the oil cloth. So now your last step, of course, would be to take this piece and put it right in the middle there and sew it. And then also, don't forget to add your piece of elastic to put the whole thing together. So I hope that I've shown you some good tips and tricks in working with laminates. Even though we saw them in different styles, you'll notice that a lot of them have similar properties, such as it's better to use tape than pins and a walking foot works really great. And the projects that you can make with them can really expand the different crafts that you can make. I hope you've enjoyed this and enjoy working with your oil cloth.