Yesterday morning when I got out of bed (at 4:30!), it was NINE DEGREES outside. This morning's 33 degrees feels positively balmy. Our yard is still blanketed with crunchy snow.
Saturday afternoon we went to the Little Rotten Baby's 3rd birthday party. Her family tricked her with candles on her cake that re-light after they're blown out. It was kind of funny. What was not all that funny was her riding her new tricycle through a house with about 15 people in it. Nobody's toes were safe!
Friday, I ventured out on the icy roads to find a present for the birthday girl. With Christmas just three weeks ago, there wasn't much she needed (or didn't already have), and with the road conditions still treacherous, I was hesitant to travel very far to find a gift. I ended up at a dollar store in the little town down the road, where I found a baby doll with a baby-doll-sized toilet that makes flushing noises when you push a button. I thought this was particularly funny since the LRB is currently struggling with potty-training.
This morning, Granddaughter #1 is heading back to college w-a-y across the state. She was supposed to have left yesterday, but the college cancelled classes for today, so she got an extra day at home. I am worried about her drive back to school. She is a cautious driver, but the interstate traffic between here and school is a racetrack on a good day, and with last week's crazy weather, she may run into some bad roads.
I don't know what I will do today. There are several half-finished watercolor portrait masterpieces littering the surfaces in the sewing room (wait, I said I was going to call it a "studio," didn't I) - in my studio. Most of them have several badly-done previous versions in a box under the table; they are awful, and I kept only because I can use their backsides for practice. Each unfinished masterpiece is at the scary point, the faces. FACES ARE SO FREAKING HARD.
Also on my mind for the last month or so is a massive illustration project I'd like to do. Parts of it have deadlines, and one of those deadlines is not far off. At this point, I'm waiting on email responses and hesitant to crank up the machines until I'm sure I'll be allowed to do what I'm considering.
I just downloaded a couple of machine embroidery designs from other digitizers. Both of them use a technique that I've been wanting to learn.
I should go do that.
* * * * * * * *
Well, I went and did that.
Let's say I am less than impressed with my two purchases. :-\
The technique I am trying to learn is machine-embroidered fringe. While goofing around on Etsy yesterday, I saw an embroidered flamingo with fringe feathers. I thought, How cute! and sat down with a pencil and sketchbook to see if I could figure out how it was done. I could not, so I went back this morning and bought the design so that I could see how this digitizer did it. While I was there, I looked for other fringed designs and found a floral spray that would be pretty on a zippered cosmetic bag, so I got that one, too.
Let me preface the following critique with one thing that I did that might have made a difference in the way these designs turned out: I reduced the size of BOTH designs by a miniscule amount. - like 8/100ths of an inch - to make them fit my hoop. It is possible that this reduction could have caused the problems I had when I sewed the designs.
In the case of the flamingo, the design path was not well thought out, and all of the stitching was very dense. There were unnecessary jumps - one even caught on the embroidery foot as it was jumping to the next object and nearly yanked the fabric out of the hoop. And my thread broke like crazy. Once a fringed design finishes sewing, the bobbin threads must be clipped to allow the thread to loop. I chose to sew the smallest design in the package, it was a CHORE to do the clipping - took me close to an hour to get it "good enough." I will try one of the larger sizes in the package, and not jack around with the dimensions, and see if it does any better. As it turned out, while the flamingo is totally cute, because of the time it takes to clip those threads, it is probably not a design that is practical for mass production (which is what I was considering).
The floral spray - man! - I am even less sure that my re-sizing caused the problems it produced. Re-sizing slightly DOWN should not have caused the skipped stitches that my test produced. And there were other problems, like running stitches instead of trims/jumps, that went right across the design. These flaws were not in the Etsy pictures of the sew-out. But the real trouble hit when the machine started sewing the fringed parts of the design. I was puttering around in the studio while the machine was going, so I do not know how many times it sewed over those parts of the design, but they were THICK, and even broke my needle. I'm scared to test it again!
But now that I've had some first-hand experience with the fringe technique, I think I'll go digitize a flamingo of my own. ;)
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