Creative Machine Embroidery Personalizes Market Tote

Yesterday, we considered creative machine embroidery and its application to the stylish Mezzaluna Market Tote.

Today, let’s get stared on making it our very own.

A lot of personalization in our projects comes down to the fabrics we chose. I like working with decorator weight linen. It’s hard wearing, and has a nice hand.

It can be pricey, but I’ve found that a certain Swedish home goods store has good quality linen and isn’t only affordable, but also wide enough for many projects.

First, let’s change your machine needle. A brand new project demands a new needle.

For this first step, let’s use a quilting and patchwork needle. It’s sharp point will glide through all the layers of the quilt sandwich quite easily.
Make a quilt sandwich of the two main bag pieces, the quilt batting and the muslin. Spray baste the layers together, using 505 Temporary Fabric Adhesive.

Make a second quilt sandwich of the gusset piece. Spray baste it together.
Quilt in whatever manner you would like. I love Free Motion Quilting, so I dropped my machine’s feed dogs, changed to the darning foot, slipped on my grippy gloves and had a ball with freemo — because it’s premo. Learn more about it here.

I used Sulky’s Polylite Machine Embroidery thread. I love the effect it brings to machine
quilting, it gives a nice shimmer to the quilted pieces — sort of like moon glow — how apropos!

When I was thinking about how I wanted to quilt the outside of the mezzaluna market tote, I considered doing straight lines on the linen, and then FMQ on the gusset, just to keep it interesting — but, I kind of got carried away with the free-mo because I really love doing it. The whole thing is free-mo.

Don’t you just love design decisions made on the fly?

Tomorrow, we explore with thread and stitches and see how creative machine embroidery personalizes market tote.