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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