Project Fair: UPDATE

Well, the good news is I now know just about everything there is to know about my sewing machine. The bad news is, I didn’t really want to know that much.

It took me ALL DAY to embroider that stupid god damned jacket on the Winnie the Pooh set. And it ended up not even being Winnie the Pooh.

First off, it DOES make a difference how you hoop the material. I was hooping it wrong for the first 5 tries. Yes, 5 tries. I was getting so mad and so frustrated I was about ready to just say “fuck it – fuck the whole damned thing.” And then it came to me that maybe this way of hooping the material wasn’t exactly the right way.

And it wasn’t. The material didn’t slide and jump around so much when I did it the right way, which is like this:

Do you see the difference in the way the material is hooped? Yeah, well I didn’t, not for the longest time.

But it ended up that this wasn’t the whole problem, anyway. The patterns I was trying to sew out were fucked. No matter which way I hooped the thing, no matter which material I sewed it out on (and I tried several), there was no way this pattern was sewing out right I tried different threads, different stabilizers, different hooping methods, different bobbins, nothing was making it work. So much for buying patterns on the internet from “amateur” digitizers. I guess there’s a reason they were $3.00 a piece. They suck.

There are some companies with professional digitized designs, I’ll stick to them.

But, I tried all day to stitch out the Pooh designs, and it just wasn’t working. So, I switched to a different design, just to see if it was  ME, or the machine, or what the hell was going on. And it was really, really nice to have something stitch out with ease. So, instead of being a Pooh on the front of the jacket, I chose instead to pick up the flowers in the material and use those for the jacket motif,  rather than the stupid bear, and now I
have this:

Which is still nice, I guess. It isn’t EXACTLY what I wanted, but I am going to order a regular Singer or other professional design card with the Pooh designs and I’ll make the jacket again with that.

But this is the jacket as it is now – see how when the sleeves are rolled up you see the lining of the jacket?

This is the lining of the jacket and the overalls (which have no straps as of yet).

And here’s the little jacket with the shirt underneath.

So that set is done except for the snaps on the shirt and the straps on the overalls. Which should be about an hour’s worth of work. The bunting is DONE.

I LOVE the ribbons on the hood – they have pearls on the sides of the ribbon. I think they are really pretty.

And the “design my own” sweater is DONE.

The third set, which will eventually be for the AFCA baby, is done except for one half of the little matching pants that go with the sweater and deciding which buttons I want to put on the sweater.

Since there is testimony again tomorrow, I should get a lot of knitting done. I can finish the Pooh set in the morning before the trial starts, then knit the rest of the day while I watch the trial. I can’t sew and watch and take notes at the same time, because there’s no TV in the sewing room, but I can knot and watch and take notes.

But, I got quite a bit done today, despite the fact that it took me all day to embroider the jacket, and I even had to go back to Joann’s to get more material because I went through about a yard of the lilac trying to embroider Pooh on the front of the jacket. And I had to get more thread. I used a whole thing of the tan.

But, like I said, I learned a lot about my machine, which I’ll probably be happy about some day. But not today. Today I’m just tired of embroidery.