Good Intentions

This post is related to gardening only because it started with a warm, sunny day....

On warm, sunny days, I like to drive with the top down on my Jeep.  When I do, I like to wear a hat to keep my big nose from sunburning.  When I wear a hat, I like to tie a scarf around it to keep it from blowing off my head.  I have (had) several scarves, but on this particular warm, sunny day - the first top-down day - I could not find a single one, and I drove without a hat.

A good hat scarf is hard to find.  The scarves in the stores are usually either too wide, too long, or too short to tie around a hat.  And so as I drove to work that day, I thought about making scarves, maybe even hand-painted scarves.  That evening, I went online and ordered a couple of yards each of chiffon, georgette, and organza ($60).  The next day, I bought fabric paint and brushes ($25).  Two days after that, I bought permanent markers ($18).  By the time the fabric arrived, I'd done some sketching and formulated a plan, and I was itching to get to work.  I cut a 6"-wide strip of white chiffon and sat down to practice.

Sadly, my brain can conceive of things that my hand can't produce.  The design I'd sketched looked amateurish.  The paint ran into the "channels" of the weave, making everything look slightly out of focus.  I switched to the markers.  The ink didn't run, but the colors were wrong.  I formulated a new plan that coincided with the marker colors at hand - peacock feathers instead of wispy fern leaves. 

Imagine my excitement when I saw that the new plan was actually going to work!  I cut a new piece of chiffon and started on the "real" scarf.  It turned out okayyy, but the inked peacock feathers lacked the irridescence of real peacock feathers.  I pondered ways to up the "wow factor."  Among my art supplies, I found a metallic gold marker and thought, "That's IT!"  A few wispy swipes of gold on the feathers would set them off perfectly.  But the hand (and the marker) failed the brain again, and I ended up with big blobs of gold that muddied up the feathers and robbed them of their wispy aspect.  *sigh*

Ok.  New plan.  Embroidery, not paint or markers. 

I spent two hours yesterday afternoon digitizing a morning glory design.  Spent another hour trying to get that wispy strip of chiffon to stick smoothly to a strip of self-stick fabric stabilizer (imagine trying to stick a length of toilet paper to shelf paper and you'll have the idea).  Finally got the fabric hooped for the embroidery machine, turned on the machine, and...nothing.  The machine gave me a message: "Raise the Presser Foot," but it was already raised.  It would sew without the embroidery unit, but would not embroider.  I could hear something rattling inside the machine.  I took off the cover to have a look.  Sure enough, a little metal gizmo had come loose.  In the process of re-installing the little gizmo, I knocked a wire loose from another gizmo.  Now, I'm going to have to take the machine to the shop.  This will cost me at least $150.

Thinking back to that warm, sunny day in the Jeep, if anybody had suggested that I should spend almost $250 on a scarf to tie around my hat, I would have accused them of having gone off the deep end. 

That is all.