Thanksgiving Weekend 'n Crafts

Happy Thanksgiving! (Day or so late :) )

Despite all of the business that’s going on (cooking, cleaning, spending time with cousins I haven’t seen in two years), I’ve still managed to write about 5,000 words this weekend (yes, that does include this blog post). I’m supposed to be at 41,667 words, but I’m only at 37K. Four thousand words behind is fixable, though. Five thousand words today, and I’ll be back to where I need to be. Almost to 50K!

Came to my parent’s house to discover that my sister is using an old glass coffee pot as a tank for her fish. Isn’t it cute?

I recently bought a sewing machine, and used it to finish up a couple of projects I’d started a couple of months back with my embroidery machine. You can purchase machines that both embroider and do regular sewing, but you’ll get products that are a little bit nicer (if more expensive) if you just get one machine for the embroidering and one for the sewing.

The first project is a bookmark (I’ve got about three different versions of these on my Etsy store – I’m a reader and a writer, after all). This bookmark was embroidered onto felt, and then I cut out the rectangle, cut out a plain one, inserted a cardboard piece between the two of them for stiffness, and sewed all of the pieces together.

Since I’d used gold as the border when I embroidered this, I used gold thread for the top, and purple thread for the bobbin thread. I’m really happy with the result! It is a bit on the small side for a bookmark (just about five inches, not including the ribbon), but it’s about the biggest that I’m going to get with my embroidery machine.

I also placed this embroidered owl on a small tote bag.

Came out cute! I didn’t make the bag or anything, but in order to have a flat single layer of the bag (otherwise I'd just embroider right though the whole thing), I had to rip the stitches out of the sides, embroider the owl, and then re-sew the sides back up. Very easy to do, just needed a sewing machine. So that’s why I had sat on this project for so long.

Both of these are in my Etsy store now, but, though I need to adjust the pattern for it, I also made a cloth headband that I want to put up for sale soon.

It’s reversible, so you can switch it around for a different pattern:

I’ve played around with making these before, but this time I included some embroidered designs. They’re supposed to sit just a few inches above the right ear (did it wrong for the brown side, as it places the flower designs above the left ear). The headbands are only about 2 ½ inches wide, which means the designs have to be no more than about an inch wide. Turns out I don’t have a lot of tiny designs, but the ones that I have came out nice. I also think I should’ve done a bright yellow for the daisies, instead of the orange, as it kind of fades into the dark brown of the fabric.

I also don’t want the fabric to come to a square end when it connects with the elastic – I want it to be more of a point. I’ve got an idea for how to do that, but haven’t had the chance to work on it yet :).

The elastic is a thick and woven type, so it won’t pull uncomfortably on anyone’s hair or skin. I always hate it when I find a hair decoration I like, but then it hurts too much to wear. For this one, I made the elastic too long by about an inch, so that’s something else to adjust.

Most of the fabric I have is cotton, but I do have some satin, so I wonder if that is something people would like? At any rate, I think these will make a fun addition to my shop.

Word Count: 37,303

Coupon still active! 

https://www.etsy.com/shop/WoolRanch?coupon=BLACKFRIDAYWEEKEND

Technology Woes, and A Questioning of Stabilizers

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.

Return!! With an Embroidery Project

I'm back!

(At least it wasn't a whole year or more, yeah?)

Anyway, what really brought me back on was my excitement over a recent purchase - specifically, this:

It's an embroidery machine - a small one, as I can't get a hoop (similar to hand embroidery) that's larger than 5.5"x5.5".  The way it works is by hooping together a stabilizer under the fabric you want to work with, in the area you want to work in.  The stabilizer is a thin fabric-like material that adds a stiffness to the fabric.  Generally they're added under the fabric, but if you need to make sure that none of the stitches fade into your fabric (like if you're working with terry cloth), it's apparently a good idea to use a thin see-through stabilizer as a topper.

This machine is a Janome 200E, the most inexpensive of the Janome's (also the smallest and least fanciest).  It works like a sewing machine, in some ways - it threads just like one and the bobbin works just like one.  What's really cool is how it works after you've picked a design (using the touch-screen) and arranged it how you like it.  The machine came with 55 designs, and I've come across several free ones online.  The designs have some minimal sizing (increase and decrease), can be rotated, flipped, combined, and positioned.

Once you've done all that, all you do is push the start button - the grey one right above the needle... and let it go!  It does have to be supervised, in case the thread breaks and the machine doesn't notice (and yes, it's smart enough to most of the time), or if the stitches are coming out funny and the tension needs to be adjusted.

It took me a little while to figure how to put the thread on the machine to minimize thread breaking or tangling, but the position it's currently in seems to be the happiest.  Below is a picture of my first embroidery attempt.

Except for one incident where I didn't notice that the pink thread had broken and the bobbin thread was the only thing coming through, that came out well.  The purple thread was the one that I had the most trouble with, as the thread kept coming out twisted from the spool and getting tangled in the machine.  Still, I'm really happy with the end result.

Close-ups!

 


For this project, I used a tear-away stabilizer on the back, and a water-soluble film-like stabilizer for the front.

I really wanted to do some free-standing lace, though, so, as I couldn't find any free ones (and the ones that came on the machine won't work for it, so I went ahead and bought a set.  Here's a couple of the results:

They're as small as they look - the cross is about 1.5 inches tall.  I made two crosses and the lamb.  I'm going to turn the crosses into earrings.  I'm not sure about the lamb.  It might become an ornament, or I suppose I could just sell pieces like that as-is.  It definitely wouldn't make for a good key-ring (too fragile) and I don't make necklaces.






I made all three of these on a single hoop, double-folded fabric-like water stabilizer.  The fabric material took a lot more to wash out then the film material, but the film material has more of a tendency to tear when it's used without fabric, and there's no way the film would've held up to the stress of making multiple projects on a single hoop.

I also tried to do a lily (equally small), but the thread caught on something when it was almost half-way done, tore in half, and resulted in a bunching of thin threads.  In a on-fabric job, this could probably be fixed by re-threading the machine, going back a few stitches, the machine going over the affected area, and then trimming the thin extra threads.  With free-standing lace, if all the threads don't interlock together correctly, the design falls apart when you wash out the stabilizer.

I saw a lot of complaints about these machines  (well, not so much the really expensive ones), and, despite the issues I did have today, 99% of them are user-error issues.  Also, why on earth would you try to learn a new tool with your good clothes?  Until I can get consistent results, I'm working with old towels and faded pillow-cases.

All in all, it's really, really fun, and I can't wait to do more.