Adventures In Cheap Weight
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While working on a recent sewing project, I had occasion to use the six old-school pattern weights that I (ahem) “liberated” from my mother’s sewing cabinet when I moved out many years ago. These weights are cylindrical and weigh 60 grams each. Their shape gives them a distressing tendency to topple over and then roll away. This, as my mother and I like to say, is “sub-optimal.”
I decided that I could do better, and after a little research (okay, I was watching YouTube), I decided on big heavy washers. Twelve large washers from the hardware store cost $22, including tax. They were 5/8” washers, meaning that was the diameter of the aperture. The outer diameter was about 2”. Two washers together weighed 100 grams. And since they were flat, no rolling away.
I started by glueing together the washers with E-6000 and then left them to dry overnight.
The next day, when the washers were firmly glued together, I wrapped them with bias tape. I had a lot of that stuff in my stash that I don’t remember buying. Possibly, it also was liberated from someone’s sewing supplies. At any rate, I used what I had. The single-fold bias tape that I’d made myself for a recent project was particularly pretty. I also used up some double-fold tape in brown, and a single-fold wide tape in black. The wide single-fold did not wrap smoothly around the washers…it was just too wide to lie flat. I used my hot glue gun to tack down the bias tape as I wound it around.
Some of the YouTube videos showed the washers being wrapped in narrow strips of duct tape. I tried that with some purple tape that I had. It looked okay…
I think the duct tape would have looked better if I had cut it, rather than than tearing it. And also, I could have used a prettier duct tape. There are lots of options but I particularly like the outer space tape and the holographic tape.
When the weights were all wrapped, I thought about putting a button on the top, just for aesthetics. I even went so far as to drag out the button tin and sort through for some likely possibilities. But even though I thought it would be pretty, I ultimately decided that I’d prefer to be able to grab the weight through the middle, so I left it open.
After I got all my weight covered, I decided I really didn’t like the way the duct tape-covered washers looked. Since the duct tape was never coming off (at least not without leaving a distressing and persistent sticky residue), I decided to just cover up the tape with fabric. To that end, I took the approach I used for my machine pincushions and my wrist pincushions, and cut out a circle of fabric big enough to wrap around the weights and cover them completely with little to no overlap. The helix circle maker is very handy for this sort of thing. Then I hand-sewed a running stitch around the outside of the circle, pulled on the thread to gather it up, and put the weight inside. Once I’d drawn the fabric taut, I stitched back and forth across the gathered edges until they were snug and secure, then tied it off. This of course left a visible mess of fabric on the top of the weight, which I then covered by hot-glueing down a flashy button out of the button stash. Pretty!
I did get a chance to test out the new weights while transferring a pattern onto tracing paper. They worked a treat! They have more surface area than my old weights, which makes for a better hold, and best of all, they don’t roll away! The fact that they are shorter than my cylindrical weights made them easier to work around while I was tracing the pattern and then cutting the fabric. Very handy! And they fit nicely into the same drawer where my original weights live. I might add, a set (or more) of these would make a lovely custom gift for the sewist in your life.
