Okay - true confession time. In school, I was a theater rat... always in plays and musicals, always taking artsy-fartsy classes, including "How To Mime" or, as I remember it, "How To Pretend You're Stuck In A Box And Look Foolish Doing It." It's true, unless you're Marcel Marceau, you look really silly doing mime. So... no mime today. But, we are still making a box. In particular, a boxed corner. This is a sewing technique everyone should have in her/his arsenal. The boxed corner creates space in something that would otherwise be flat. For example, in a tote bag, you have a lot more room to put all your stuff if you create boxed corners. Basically, any sewn corner can be turned into a boxed corner with a few simple steps. 

Louisa drew the brush through her honey-colored hair, counting silently. Fifty stokes, every evening, until it shone in the candlelight. She smiled at her reflection in the mirror and dabbed perfume at her temples. Is there anything more classically romantic for a bedroom retreat than a beautiful vanity? This week, as we return for the final chapter of our Romantic Bedroom Retreat series with Rowan and FreeSpirit Fabrics, we have three new projects to help you create a lovely vanity table, a matching chair cushion and three accessory boxes. One of our original goals with this series was to show you how to bring some of the new substrates into your design planning. Westminster is an industry leader in this area, producing collections in a terrific variety of substrates, from voile to corduroy to knits and more. Today's vanity skirt and cover feature voile and laminate. The voile for the skirt provides the billowing drape; the laminate for the top gives you a surface you can simply wipe clean. 

It’s a wee bit of an understatement to say there are lots of sewing trims. In fact, if you were to lay all of the trims available end to end, they'd likely cover the earth! But choice is what we love, isn't it? It adds the spice to our sewing life. And, a room like our Romantic Bedroom Retreat, sponsored by Rowan and FreeSpirit Fabrics, cries out for some extra special embellishments. If you’ve been a Sew4Home reader for a while, you may have read our original tutorial on Terrific Trims. Since then, we’ve developed more project ideas using different kinds of sewing trims – some trendy, some traditional. A perfect example is the current Romantic Retreat projects for which we dove into the upholstery trim section to find an unbelievable assortment of tasseled and beaded trims and fringe. Another recent example was our experimental trim week with Simplicity; we designed two fashionable handbags (links are provided at the end of the article for these and other trim-focused projects) around “new” metal trims. This lead to our popular tutorial: Adding Metal Trims to Sewing Projects. Between these and others, we realized it was time for a Terrific Trims update.

Creating a lush and luxurious Romantic Bedroom Retreat is the perfect opportunity to incorporate a few of the wide variety of trims available. We added dense chainette fringe to our Coverlet and elegant tasseled fringe with crystal accents on both our Valance and Bolster. Plus we have piping and more in upcoming tutorials. These options just prick the surface of the variety of trims available both in-store and online. They always look so beautiful wrapped around their little bolts, rows and rows from which to choose. But many people shy away from using these gorgeous embellishments because they're unsure how to sew them in place. We have more information on the trims themselves coming up later in the Romantic Retreat series. Today, we’re here to help you understand how to use your sewing machine, and the specialty feet (as well as standard feet) available, to sew all kinds of trims.