Today you’ll meet Paulette’s daughter Tes, while she shows you around the sewing studio!
All of the gadgets and goodies that she talks about can be found here: Sewing Room Stuff
Video transcript:
Hello, I’m Tes Scholtz, I am the daughter half of Tulip Square, and for my first video I thought I would show you our sewing studio, and some of our tools that we like to use and some things that people have asked about. So, let’s have a look around.
First we have our wall of fabric, which is lovely. We also have drawers full of fabric, fat quarters in there, there’s pre-cuts down here, some jelly rolls and layer cakes.
More fat quarters, more fat quarters, you get the idea. We mostly keep our…fabric separated by color, although we will keep some bundles together. These are some beautiful Connecting Threads bundles, and these are all batiks, and all the whites there, but we generally separate them by color, or sometimes specifics, like these are all holiday prints.
And from here we have this sewing station that we leave set up just for quilting, then we have Mom’s area, that’s where Paulette does all her work there.
Here’s our cutting table, nice and roomy, and right in front of the fabric, which is lovely, and then we have my sewing station.
And here’s my iron. You can spend a lot of money on a specialized quilting iron, but it’s really not necessary. One like this, this one’s been great. I’ve had this for over 2 years, it doesn’t leak, it’s got a nice steam, it’s got a ceramic dual plate, so there’s no hot spots, nice and even, and really truly that’s all you need. I’ll be providing links to this and everything else I’m going to show you today, so that you know where to find it if you’re interested. Another thing is this little gadget. It’s a blade saver. It’s a thread cutter. You put your used rotary blades in there so you can always have a fresh blade in here, a lot of the blade cutters you can’t change the blade in, and then it also packs up neatly so if you need to take it with you, it’s perfectly safe to take it. Handy little thing, comes in all different colors, and the base is also the case. So there’s that. BladeSaver. That’s what it’s called. Ok.
We each have our own sewing station and this is mine, and I have it in this table but it doesn’t actually fit in the table because of this curve here. So I have one of these Teflon sheets over that, and it’s perfectly fine, everything glides over, nothing gets caught and that is a really easy solution to a table that doesn’t fit your machine. So that’ll be linked as well.
Don’t go anywhere without these clips. We all use these clips right, and I’m throwing some on the floor and that’s okay.
Normally I support going to your local quilt shop, but for some reason they charge a ridiculous amount for these little clips, and you can buy 100 of them on Amazon for 12 bucks or something so with this cute little tin, there’s a link to that also, but we we use those for everything now let me go pick this one, let me go pick this one up, and I’ll meet you over there.
Okay this next thing is something we get asked about all the time. This is a fabric cutting system it’s called the Quilt Cut 2. I don’t even know if I’d be quilting if Mom hadn’t had one of these already. So you just slide this along and cut it wherever you want, switch the ruler to this way, and you just cut along, move it along, and you can also, if you squeeze this in, you can angle it, whatever degrees you want 60° angles if you want to cut, if you have special cuts, want to make some triangles, and line them up cut them. So nice. It’s got all kinds of intervals where you can put it, and it locks into place when you put it at an angle like that, see that? Very cool. And then still you lift it up, put your fabric under, super cool. This thing is great.
and I mean obviously we have variety of rulers too, but this thing is great. Speaking of cutting, we’ve been using these titanium blades from the Fabric Hut and we have a special deal for our viewers actually, and I will link to that as well. You can get them for half price. But they’re they’re very sharp, and they stay sharp for quite some time. They seem to stay sharp longer than the blades we have used in the past, so you’ll definitely want to give those a try.
We just use the basic Olfa cutters. We like them, they work perfectly, and we don’t feel like we need anything special for that.
Another thing we get asked about all the time, is this chair! It’s an exercise ball, and it’s a chair. It’s really just one of these exercise balls, in a frame. We love these. We have them all over the house. We have them for our computer chairs, they’re super comfortable, plus you can bounce when you’re sitting on them, so that’s always fun. Another thing I wanted to show you is these rings. Let me just scoot this over so you can see. So let’s say you want to quilt a thing. These, free motion quilting rings, if you’ve never tried one, and you like free motion quilting, or you haven’t tried free motion quilting, either way. You just put this on here, it’s super grippy on the back. So you put it on there and it just grips that fabric, and look how easy it moves it around. So then you can just, you know this little spot here, is for where you put your needle in, so then your needle is in here, then you just move it around, you can just pick it up and move it where you want it, because it really grips that fabric. It’s not moving off that fabric, you know. It grips it really nicely and helps to move it around so this is the 11-inch one and 8-inch one, and like everything, I will have these linked in the description.
So Mom’s iron, we haven’t actually been able to find it again on Amazon. Maybe they don’t make it anymore, which is a pity because this one is super nice. This one is the 1700 watt. They do have an 1800 now, but we haven’t tried it so. But that’s the PurSteam and that’s been a powerhouse too. It’s been very durable, and again, no leaking, no issues, affordable quilting irons.
You can see we’ve got all kinds of different lamps and lights and clamps and brackets and and things that don’t normally need to be in a sewing room, but this is so we have lots of light for our videos, and this is the camera arm that Paulette uses to get all those good shots while she’s sewing, trying to get all the different angles.
And in this drawer, we have all our thread. We have this double layered like this, so you get all the different colors underneath there, easy access, and this is all the Essential Cotton from Connecting Threads.
Ever since we first started using this thread, we really don’t use anything else. It’s fantastic.
So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed this little glimpse into our space, and like I said, I will put a link in the description box below, and rather than putting like a whole bunch of links to different things, I’m putting one link, to a blog post, that has pictures and where to get all of the different things I was talking about here. So you don’t have to remember what I said, or what you saw. It’ll all be there. I look forward to seeing you all again. If you like our videos make sure you hit that little bell so you’re notified when we put out new videos, and don’t forget to subscribe, happy sewing, and we’ll see you soon.