Crazy Dish Mat (part 1)

Dish Drying Mat 2.0 begins with an inexpensive and cheap roll of 2.5-inch fabric strips from Amazon and a dish drying mat from the dollar store, also inexpensive and cheap. The fabric strips are only 20 inches long and are of very poor-quality fabric. The dish mat is OK except for the shape which is neither a rectangle (no 90-degree angles) nor a parallelogram; it will be "squared up" eventually.

Learning goals here:

1. edge binding improvement

2. crazy quilt as you go experiment

Work in progress ....

The crazy quilting is done and went OK. Working on a puffy surface such as these dish mats makes getting the fabric taut a bit tricky. But overall, I am happy with this part. I did find a raw edge in amidst all of the angles and attempted to darn over it rather than take out about a dozen pieces of fabric and try again. This was not my finest hour as you can see in the photo but it's not that bad for a first attempt. Next time I know to watch out for those sneaky raw edges as I stitch.

I tried to stitch around the outer edges after trimming off the excess fabric. This produced a bit of puckering. I'll be trimming that off when I square up the mat for edge binding. <sigh> Tomorrow....

Meanwhile, Singer is up and running; cleaning and oiling seems to have solved the problems I was having the other day. The most significant problem appears to have been the lint felted in between the feed dogs which I had to scrape out with a screwdriver. Otherwise, I expect the lint I found in and around the bobbin case was nothing abnormal.

I did discover that despite what the manual says there appears to be no way to lower the feed dogs on this machine. A disappointment as I had hoped to make stippling one of my learning exercises soon. I've had several suggestions from a Facebook group about how to overcome this deficiency, but I'm concerned about what they might do to the machine. Examples: painter's tape and cardboard with a hole for the needle.

Ah well, maybe Santa will bring me that heavy duty machine (so I can sew denim and multiple layers of thick fabrics) with the ability to lower the feed dogs. In the meantime, Singer is doing just fine for my learning experiments. And today I received a shipment of zippers-by-the-yard from Amazon so I'm gearing up for Zipper Pouch 3.0!

dks, 11 Oct 2025