The more you use technology, the more dependent you become on it, and thus, somehow, the more often it fails.
(As I write this using technology that barely existed when I was born)
I and another office assistant have spent the last two of the last three weeks (and the last week someone, if not one of us) at work calling our IT department (they outsource it) at least once everyday. It started with updating our email service. And then somehow went downhill from there. We came into work three Mondays ago with no one able to receive or send emails on their computers or their phones (through our work emails, anyway), a real estate matter that needed to close that morning (requiring emails to and from our office, escrow office, the seller, the buyer/borrower, and the lender), and a litigation matter that had to be filed (via email, naturally) as soon as possible.
Everything did eventually get sorted out, but it took two days for them to get everyone’s emails working. The next few days involved bugs that kept popping up with issues sending emails. And then there's the general fun of issue cropping up due to those updates, or due to something else.
It’s kind of funny – whenever someone in technology implements an update to make something work better, it never fails to always fail in some way. Murphy’s law, I suppose.
In other news for my personal life, I went to a musical last weekend – “Sister Act”. It was a lot of fun (and funny)! A friend of mine got a small role, and invited me to the opening night. It’s been quite awhile since I’ve last been to a play.
I also hit a couple of dollar stores looking for cheap items to practice embroidering on, and came out with a child’s t-shirt and a bunch of nice micro-fiber cleaning cloths. I used one of the designs that came with the machine on one of the cleaning cloths, and, in terms of how the stitching came out on the micro-fiber, I think it came out nice.
I’m not a fan of the design – the three dots are kind of weird. It’s actually possible for me to skip that part of the design, though, so I might try that. I also should’ve placed the design further away from the edge. Still, even if it’s not going to become part of my sellable merchandise, it’ll be fun to have a cleaning cloth with a pretty personalized design on it for myself. As for the t-shirt, the design caused the fabric to pucker much more than I would've liked, so I'll have to keep experimenting
I also did a few more lace designs. These two are free samples I found online.
I love the thread color, but making these took much longer than it should’ve due to the thread constantly breaking. The snowflake, for instance, didn’t come out correctly, and will eventually fall apart. Not all of the threads were able to interlock. I don’t think it’s a flaw of the design, but a flaw in the thread. It’s a bit frustrating, but next time I’ll have to spend more money on higher quality thread. I’ve recently purchased white, silver, and metallic gold thread that should be in that ‘higher quality’ category. The white's nice but the metallic ones are a bit finicky, which I kind of did expect. Metallic thread's always a bit different. It's quite pretty, though.
I also bought a couple of triangle-shaped pieces of felt for a non machine embroidery project, but I got an idea and stitched a design on it. I'm going to turn it into a bookmark (as soon as I get access to a regular sewing machine again. I have some (small) hopes for an older machine getting fixed, but if it won't, I'll break down and buy a hundred dollar Singer I found).
Techniques-wise, I didn't use any stabilizer with the felt, and seeing how I stopped having the bobbin thread show up on top (I have the tension turned down all the way to zero, so there's not much more I can change with the machine), I gave it a go with a towel. I did use water-soluble stabilizer on top, but that's just to keep the stitches from fading into the terry cloth threads. As a result, I saw no bobbin thread where it didn't belong.
So how necessary are bottom stabilizers? I'll have to keep experimenting. Maybe with thin fabric, or with really dense designs.
By the way, here's a video of the machine going on the felt project.
By the way, here's a video of the machine going on the felt project.
