Thread

Lots of thread, originally uploaded by Mellicious.

Rayon on the right, cotton on the left!

Organizing time

Between unpacking and then the holidays, and then Vegas and then the flu, I never have gotten around to doing much with the sewing room, much less actually sewing. But I've finally started feeling better this week, and it seems to be time. So I'm organizing - first thread, a whole drawer-ful of it, and now I'm working on the fabric I brought home from Mama's house. There's a lot of that, too, and I only brought home a fraction of it, at that. I'm making piles, by color, and then I'll have to merge it with the fabric I already had. It's messy enough in there already, and it's probably going to get even more messy before it gets better!

There was a lot of rayon thread - especially Robison-Anton, on those big bulky spools - and a few spools of silk, and two spools of invisible thread, which I'm sure I will never use but I hate to throw away, and then a whole rainbow of cotton - mostly Mettler. You can tell the colors Mama liked - there's a lot of green and gold, and then a lot of pastels - pink and purple, especially. And luckily a lot of beige - I really like to use neutrals for most of my piecing, anyway. Well, I sure won't need to buy thread any time soon!

Threads

I got a newsletter from Quilters Threads (which is what's left of the late, lamented Web of Thread, under new ownership) and it said, among other things, that Sulky and Superior Threads both had newsletters you can subscribe to. That had never occurred to me. You'd think it would have, wouldn't you, considering the way I adored Web of Thread and everything. Also, YLI has something that they call a newsletter, but, interestingly, if you go to their website, you find that it is actually a blog! (Which is fine, too. Maybe they think calling it a blog will keep some of their less web-savvy users from reading it, do you think?)

I have definite opinions about thread, and I have been meaning to write an entry about it for a while now, and I just hadn't gotten around to it up to now. Of course my #1 opinion can be easily summed up in one sentence, and it's this: Coats & Clarks thread really sucks!! I shudder every time I hear somebody say they use it. It just sheds too much. I hate it.

I tried to convince my mom to stop using Coats & Clarks a year or two ago, and she said, yeah, you're right, and we actually gave away all her C&C thread (somebody probably got a bag full of it at the guild auction last year) and we were going to use only the good stuff from there on out - and a month or so later I came over one Saturday and she had bought some more Coats & Clarks! She forgot all about it. Although actually, I think that story says more about my mom in the last year or so of her life than it does about anything else. And maybe about how people tend to buy what they've always bought. (I didn't say a word to her about it after that. I decided given how things stood, it wasn't all that terribly important in the grand scheme of things.)

As far as what I actually do use, I have always used a lot of Mettler - you do have to watch out for polyester vs cotton with Mettler/Metrosene, or at least I do, because I tend to forget which is which! (Metrosene is the polyester one, I just double-checked to make sure. But the spools look very similar.) I am not really firmly in the anti-polyester camp, in general, but I do like to be aware of what I'm using. I try to buy cotton, but I don't necessarily throw away a spool of polyester if I have it! I have also used Gutermann a good bit and it is fine. (And they also make both polyester & cotton versions, as I recall.)

I have gotten where I mostly piece with neutrals. I don't particularly try to match the fabric, especially when I am working on a quilt that's multicolored (which practically all of my quilts are). I usually just use a lighter or darker neutral, whatever seems to blend well. When I pieced my all-green quilt I had a spool of a medium green (sort of a lime color) that I used and it worked well. But I bought a set of neutral colors from Connecting Threads and that's what I've mostly been using for the past year or so. They have their own brand of thread, and I have no idea who makes it for them, but the quality seems good.

As far as quilting thread, I have quilted my last couple of quilts with Sulky Blendables and they came out very well. I also have a spool of green King Tut that I will try out whenever I finally get around to finishing the green quilt! The two seem very similar. Before that, my mom and I both got on a big kick of quilting with rayon. We used various brands - Sulky, Madeira, Robison-Anton, even Coats & Clarks from time to time. Rayon looks really pretty on the quilt and it's nice to work with. I stopped doing this lately only because I wanted to try out the variegated cottons, not because I decided I didn't like rayon. I will probably stick with the variegated ones for a while, though, I like them a lot.