In part 2 of The Scrap Cushion episode, Lisa discusses her success with a rectangular cushion and then moves on to the main topic of the episode, the scrap cushions. Lisa divides the episode into three sections: a summary of the cushion, making the math work, and lessons learned. She explains how she calculated the volume of her scraps and realized that the cushion she made was too big. Lisa then shares her process of making a circle cushion, including measuring and cutting the fabric, choosing a zipper, and sewing the cushion. She concludes with some lessons learned and her plans for future cushions.

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Lisa Woolfork is an associate professor of English specializing in African American literature and culture. Her teaching and research explore Black women writers, Black identity, trauma theory, and American slavery. She is the founder of Black Women Stitch, the sewing group where Black lives matter. She is also the host/producer of Stitch Please, a weekly audio podcast that centers on Black women, girls, and femmes in sewing. In the summer of 2017, she actively resisted the white supremacist marches in her community, Charlottesville, Virginia. The city became a symbol of lethal resurging white supremacist violence. She remains active in a variety of university and community initiatives, including the Community Engaged Scholars program. She believes in the power of creative liberation.

Instagram: Lisa Woolfork

Twitter: Lisa Woolfork

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Lisa Woolfork 0:10

Hello stitchers. Welcome to Stitch Please, the official podcast of Black Women Stitch, the sewing group where Black lives matter. I'm your host, Lisa Woolfork. I'm a fourth generation sewing enthusiast with more than 20 years of sewing experience. I am looking forward to today's conversation. So sit back, relax, and get ready to get your stitch together.

Lisa Woolfork 0:38

Hey, friends, hey! It's Lisa from Black Women Stitch. And thank you once again for joining us for the Stitch Please podcast. Come on in and we are talking today about the first scrap cushion and the second scrap cushion. At the end of the last episode, when we last left our intrepid heroine, she was trying to figure out if she had made a floor cushion or a marshmallow. And I'm happy to report that in today's episode, we will get to the bottom of that. Did I make a cushion or did I make a marshmallow? I can tell you, spoiler alert, that anything that I made was too big. But the episode for today is divided into three sections. The first one is the summary of the cushion that is not a marshmallow. The second one, it's a math victory. Section two is about a math victory. And then section three is a kind of a wrap up of some of the lessons that I learned and what I would do again or not do again. And then we'll see where that takes us because I think I might want to redo the cushion that I did make. And I will probably talk about that on the Patreon. There's lots of great stuff on the Patreon about these scrap cushions and why I was wanting to do it and, and there's a great time lapse video of me pinning the circles. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's concentrate on the beginning. The scrap cushion that I'm making is made from encara fabric. And I am using it because the wax in the fabric is a bit more dense. And it makes the fabric kind of stand up a little bit more. I was thinking about a denim but I am having trouble with the bobbin case in my semi industrial machine. And so I don't really want to put that on my main domestic sewing machine because, despite being incredibly expensive, it does not love fighting with heavy fabrics. And I don't love the thought of having to find someone to repair it in the desert that has become the sewing machine repair industry. Apparently, in my state, there's only two shops in the entire state that could fix this machine, which is making me wonder "why do I have this?".

Lisa Woolfork 3:09

Lisa Woolfork 6:23

My next idea was to start with the beginning. Rather than think about what I wanted the cushion to look like, I started with what I had. And I said "here's a bag of scraps. What shape, what dimensions would best suit this lawn and leaf bag of knit fabrics that I have?". If I compressed it down, it could go this way or that way. But I want to see how much room I have. And so that's what I did. I measured the volume first. And that made all the difference.

Lisa Woolfork 7:06

Lisa Woolfork 9:15

A tool that really helped me that also helps me in the sewing room is my cutting mat. It is a wonderful mat from a small company out in California, and they are really great, called Big Mat. And I really liked them and their products very much. And they have these very bright mats and pretty bright rulers as well. I marked out a 20 inch square based exclusively on the fact that when I put my scrap bag on the big mat. It was pretty much a 20 inch blob. It was 20 inches on one side. It was 18 on the other side. It was 22, it was, you know, it was nebulous. But I believed that it could be, I believe that it could fit really well if I just decided on what shape it would be. And so I said "okay, well, we're gonna make this a 20 inch circle. Now, how much how tall should it be? How tall does it need to be in order to hold the fabrics inside?". And so I grabbed the top of the lawn and leaf bag and I twisted it and held it tight, as if to replicate what it would be like if it was inside the cushion, the zippered cushion. And it was about six inches tall. And so I said "okay, I will make two circles. And I will measure the circumference of this circle in order to get the band. And then I will just basically sew together the two circles with the band in the middle, you know, like an Oreo cookie." You know? Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

The first step in this process was to draw the circle. I had tried to do this before, but I did not give it the kind of preparation that required it to work. In order to draw this circle, I took a piece of tracing paper and taped it down to the cutting mat. I took a piece of tracing paper, the type that you use to trace off patterns for garments. It's about 40... let's see, how wide is this pattern paper... This pattern paper is about 44 inches wide. And you can buy it in however, whatever length that you want. And I taped it down so that it did not shift. This was going to be important for how I was going to draw the circle.

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I marked off a 20 inch box on the grid of the cutting mat. And then I taped that off so that, or I traced it off in a pencil so that I would know and be able to mark the center. And I marked the center with a dot at the 10 inch mark from the axis, that was the horizontal, and then again at the vertical. So that kind of bullet pointed middle. From there, I decided to follow some instructions that I've seen on YouTube, where a person had drilled a hole in the middle and made a circle by sweeping a pencil that was attached to the nail in the middle using a thread or a rope or something that could inscribe the circle. Listen, I was not about to drill no holes in my table. I was like "are you serious right now?" Like drilling a hole was the only thing you could think to do? I know some people also do it with a pin or with a thumbtack. I wasn't doing that either. I decided to measure the radius of my 20 inch circle, which was 10 inches. And I looped a piece of thread around a pencil really tightly. And I measured it from the 10 inch mark to the 20 inch mark. I knew this would be the radius. And so I just held my thumb down on my left hand. You know, I put a piece of tape over the string that the anchor point at the center point at the 10 inch mark and then I put my thumb on top of it. And then I just kind of held that string out as tight as possible. So that it was exactly meeting that 10 inch mark, creating essentially a 20 inch circle. It was very satisfying. I must say it was very satisfying. It was not a perfect process, however, because there was a little bit of wobbliness and so I decided to square it up, as one might say, or to true it up. And once I trued it up, the radius of my 20 inch circle was actually 21.5, or whatever. 21.25. Still, fine. I used that measurement to calculate the circumference. So after I got my circles drawn, I measured the diameter, so that I could calculate the circumference or so that Google could calculate the circumference. Google gave me the number, I added one inch because I knew I wanted to use a half an inch seam allowance to join the circles. And to join the band that would connect the circle, you have to be sure to add seam allowances. Now this is the funny thing. I thought I was going to have to add seam allowances to the horizontal cut of the band. I don't know why I thought "oh, no, I need to add this." And I did it. I didn't add it. And I didn't need to. But I don't know why I thought I did. And I'm not sure if it's because, just maybe about my anxiety about circles and how challenging they can be and how circle piecing in quilting, for example, is an incredibly advanced technique. And it requires all this easing. And it's just like, ugh, you know. It's yes, I would say it's a headache. It's a headache. But everything is a headache if you don't love doing it, you know. I don't love doing that particular style of quilting, or piecing quilts. But I do like a circle cushion and was very excited about this. When I first thought of the cushion idea, I wanted it to look like a little hat box. That was my goal, I wanted it to look like a little hat box. And that would require a handle. So here we are ready to go to the sewing machine, we're going to sit down with our three pieces of fabric.

But wait, before I get there, I have to pause and tell you about the zipper. This was really interesting. And I was glad that this came to be. After truing up the circles to make sure that they were even or even enough on both sides. One of the things that was important to me about the circle cushion was my ability to access it without straining the piece. I did not want it to be something where the zipper would find itself being strained because I'd be using it a lot or because it's holding in a lot of fabric. So I made sure to choose zippers that were separating zippers. This is not something that the recipe or that the instructions would call for. I'm sure there's instructions out there for this, but again, I kind of winged this by conquering my fear of math. And I was concerned about the strain on the zipper and it somehow breaking and then the cushion itself would, you know, have to be remade or something, and that would be really annoying. So I chose separating zippers because I thought that would just be easier to use. I did a separating zipper for the square cushion or the rectangle cushion. And I did a separating zipper for this one. For the bottom, I cut the regular circle that I had trued up and made a pattern piece for and I do plan to use this again. And I made a, rather than making a circle and then cutting down the middle and then adding, I was still I was thinking like" oh, well, you could add some bias binding along the edges of that." I didn't want to do that. I decided instead to cut a third circle. And this would be a way to fold the circles that I had in half and use those as the top part or the bottom part of the cushion. This meant that using a good zipper that was very long, meant that I could open the cushion and sift through it and choose the fabrics that I wanted to use and put them back without giving a lot of strain on the zipper or on the piece itself. To make the bottom of this cushion in the way that it would be accessible and durable, I used a simple zipper foot to stitch the folded circles right on top of the zipper tape. And then I went back and trued up that circle. I trued that circle because the circle was different. The circle was larger. I had expanded it by folding it in half, which also eliminated the need for seam allowances because it would sit there right at a very precisely cut diameter of the circle. But it would still shift the measurements. And that was one of the things I wanted to make sure I got right. The zipper that I chose worked very well. And after I made sure that the zipper circle was the exact same size as the non zippered single circle, we were ready to sit and sew. And that's when you go and sit down at the sewing machine and get ready to see how it all turned out. Y'all I was so nervous sitting down to sew this thing. And I cannot tell you why. I think all of the like math anxiety that came back from being a kid and being like, not good at math, or you know, being good at lots of other things in school, but math being like a real challenge and just trying and not being able to have it click. And yet, when I put this cushion together y'all, the first circle came out perfectly. There was no puckers. I did ease throughout. And the way that I eased it was kind of a very simple way. So you have two fabrics, one is red, and one is blue. And the blue is longer than the red, but you want them both to be the same size. You take your fabric sandwich, your little stack, and you put it on the sewing machine with whatever is the long part closest to and touching the feed dogs. It's almost like a differential feed, that allows the feed dogs to pull the fabric, while the top part is not moving at all. And so it's almost like the feed dogs are very lightly gathering the fabric, and you can't see it once you've done it. But if you are really precise with it, it is practically invisible. So I did that a couple of times. But overall, it wasn't even that necessary. I think I got one pucker in one of the cushions in one top part, maybe the part with the zipper. But for the most part, I was really happy with it. As I was stitching the band to the first circle, I remembered that I wanted this to look like a hatbox. And so I thought" oh, I should put a little strap or something like this and stitch it to this part of the band, I should do this." And I happened to have some really nice denim studded trim that was right nearby, and I slid that piece right in there and double stitched over it and zigzag stitched over really strongly. And then when it came to do the other side, I did the same thing. And then when I turned it right side out, I had a little handle. Oh, I was so excited. It was really very cool. So I was very excited that I happened to remember that I wanted it to look like a hat box. And now I have a way of moving it.

In our closing part for today's episode, I'm going to talk about a couple of lessons that I learned. One, I can be good at math. That felt so good! It was really, it was just very satisfying. You know, I'm like "oh, wow! I learned something. I tried something. That was very satisfying. I also would say that if you want to do this too, I would advise you starting with the shape of your scraps. Do not make a scrap cushion based on a standard measurement or a pattern or something like that, unless you've calculated how big the volume or the interior space of that cushion will be, and how that compares to the scraps that you have. Then alternatively, you can then measure the shape of the bag you have, ot the box you have, or the drawer you have or whatever, and then make a cushion to match those exact dimensions. And that's pretty cool, too. So I just wish y'all great success. I was super happy with this cushion. If you're on the Patreon you get to see or have seen some of the behind the scenes stuff. But this was a really fun project. And I'm glad I'm doing it. And my next step is to probably unsew the big cushion that I made, and remake it as a circle cushion that's the same circumference as what I have now, but much taller. So that's going to be fun to try. So stay tuned for the Patreon. And I'm sure I'll be talking about that process there. Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and listening to me talk about my scrap cushion. I hope this has inspired you to make your own. And if you do, tag me so I can see.

You've been listening to Stitch Please, the official podcast of Black Women Stitch, the sewing group where Black lives matter. We appreciate you joining us this week and every week for stories that center Black women, girls, and femmes in sewing. We invite you to join the Black Women Stitch Patreon community with giving levels beginning at $5 a month. Your contributions help us bring the Stitch Please podcast to you every week. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your support, and come back next week and we'll help you get your stitch together.