Friday, December 26, 2014

Brody and me are buds again !




Pretty much had all Christmas day to do whatever I wanted, provided I didn’t wanna go anywhere. (grin) We actually did go to Sevvy (7-11), and I got a bag of my favorite cheese popcorn while Dearest Son got a big Slushie and Beloved Hubby got his customary Big Gulp. I knew what I wanted to do, but I danced around it all day.


First, before I could sew, Beloved had to re-hang my fluorescent light back up – I’d have done it m’self, but the screws were lost, and he had the big box of screws with him at work all week. After that, the fabric I wanted to use looked dingy, possibly even splotched with stains, so I washed and bleached it, with a few other laundry items that also needed treatment. After that, I wanted to wait ‘til after lunch to start anything. Fabric looked much better.


Once lunch was out of the way, I needed to clean the sewing Arena. Then I had to swap machines and find all the embroidery accessories – the hoop, interfacing, the right thread colors – and the pattern and thread for the regular sewing machine. All that assembled, I couldn’t remember how to transfer designs from my laptop to the embroidery machine, and I barely remembered how to thread it. At least I was smart enough to tape the power cord to the machine this time.


But once Beloved and Dearest stretched out for afternoon naps, I really didn’t have any more excuses. The fabric was hooped up correctly – after I made sure there was plenty there to make the shirt front, and enough left for the back pieces not embroidered – the thread was in order,  I remembered how to skip steps, and even the bobbin was full and ready to go. I took such a deep breath before hitting the ‘start’ button, I almost passed out.


In spite of my anxiety and not being used for probably two years now, ‘Brody’ worked flawlessly. The original design was an applique-ish stand-alone (aka, in-the-hoop) ornament, but I stitched just the fancy part - although an ornament stitched around the Beauty and the Beast design probably wouldn't have looked bad here. I found the design itself a bit sparse, so I ran it twice, one on top of the other, and worried that it stitched too low in the hoop, hence too low for a well-proportioned shirt design. Turned out to be unfounded, I just moved the pattern a bit further down on the fabric. Came out just right !


So, now that I know Brody’s fine, I can go to town with other projects, starting today, and maybe stop flailing on m’self for putting off using my embroidery designs for so long, maybe sometime next week. I really don’t know what took me so long to come back to it – I know before, I was super-tense every time I got near Brody, so it wasn’t as pleasant an experience as it should have been. Today, it took a while, but I relaxed and once it was begun, just went with it. I didn’t agonize for hours whether or not I hooped the fabric correctly, or put in the right / enough stabilizer, or worried constantly that the hoop would break. If it hasn’t rotted away yet, it’s probably pretty stable ! In fact, the only thing I ever broke (besides the occasional needle or thread) since I’ve had Brody has been the finger-screws that came with the hoop. (grin) And when I went to a hardware store for replacements, the helpful hardware person said she’d had to replace her sister’s screws, too – and hers was much higher end than my entry-level model.


Maybe I just needed to take a year or two off, to learn to relax ?


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