Fun with ultrasuede

For the past several days I have been with ultrasuede in these colors to complete a bedroom set consisting of a comforter, bedskirt, king size shams and throw pillows. Someone asked me to make this for their bedroom and it will look fantastic when it is completed!

Ultrasuede is a little more difficult to work with than just cotton fabric, but not too bad unless you are trying to sandwich two layers together with a puffy batting and stitch the multiple layers together.

Since I'm making a comforter and not a quilt, I used a couple layers of a high loft polyester batting instead of my choice low loft cotton/poly batting. And there's not much to quilting and no binding since it needs to be soft and puffy instead of flattening it with lots of quilting stitches.

I sandwiched the pieces together by laying the backing and top right sides together with batting to one side, then stitched around the fours sides, leaving a section open for turning the comforter right side out. That wasn't too difficult.

Then I had decided to stitch in the ditch which would be only five seams across the width. After stitching one seam and struggling to get the fabric through the machine, not trying to create tucks and trying to maintain an even stitch length, I decided that was not going to work.

After trying a couple other things and ripping those seams as well as the first one, I decided this job had to be done by hand. So I'm in the process of making little tacks every 6-8 inches in the ditch. This should allow the batting to have some puff, but still keep the fabric and batting tacked together.

Getting through two layers of batting and two layers of ultrasuede with a hand needle is somewhat of a challenge. Even with a thimble on a couple fingers, my hand and fingers will be sore for a while. But I'm glad to say that I'm half done!

Goal for today:
finish hand tacking comforter
stitch and finish bedskirt (strips are cut, but not stitched)

I actually have a lot completed considering I only received the fabric last week and just got started last Saturday. :)