Woke up this morning
wondering when and how and where I ate a concrete bowling ball last night. Felt
better after a while – tried twice to nap, no luck with that once Dearest Son
discovered our recorded cable was erased – so the day moved along.
Downloaded several beautiful
free embroidery designs, a free standing lace shell, butterfly, and star, a set
of hair clip covers, an applique tree, and a rose-covered Easter egg, and
wondered why I paid for such when so many are out there free. Then I remembered
my burgeoning Frozen design stash, then
how I had to fight from ordering some gorgeous sea-themed sale designs from Urban Threads all weekend, and hid my embarrassment
in a late leftover lunch.
Couple hours later, the mail
carrier delivered my Amazon order – the 200 sheets of wash-away stabilizer ! I
knew just what to try it out on. Oh. Oh, shoot. Um, this is the plastic-y kind,
the stuff I always had trouble with before. Not the soft fabric kind I thought
I ordered. Looked at the sales page again. Yup, darn near impossible to tell
from the picture. And none of the reviewers said anything save that it was
totally awesome to work with. Well, heck. All I could do was hoop a sheet up
and give it a go, hoping that maybe, just maybe, I could stitch a design
without it tearing this time.
I think I sweated out each
one of those 15,823 stitches. It was about 2/3 of the way through when the
first tiny tears started to appear. I knew that, even if it did make it all the
way through, it wouldn’t look nearly as good as I’d hoped. But, since it was so
far along anyway, I decided to let it go until it had to be stopped, just out
of curiosity, and the hope that I could diagnose my fault and still use the
other 199 sheets.
Aaand, it looks awful.
Looked even worse before I trimmed some of the loose threads. I wondered if it
was because the stitch count was simply too thick for a single sheet of
stabilizer. So I switched to a smaller design, doubled the stabilizer. . . and
still had problems. Stuff didn’t tear, but a lot of places that should have met
didn’t. For the technically inclined, those are called ‘registry errors’, and
they usually indicate bad hooping.
But my faults could have
been from hooping too tight or too loose. (sigh) That’s another reason I gave
up on free standing lace years ago – it’s so nerve-wracking, watching the
needle go over an area you already know is weak and stressed over and over and
over. Or, after all, this could go back to the original problem, that plastic
stuff just isn’t meant for what I’m trying to make it do. So I hooped up a
single thickness of the fabric-y stuff and ran the smaller design again. . .and
it went better, but there were still errors. Now I had a choice – run it again
with a new needle (one of the few aspects I hadn’t changed), or do something
else, and wonder until I stitch it again if it’s me or the design.
I did something else. Ran a
few tension tests, adjusted it up a bit, but nowhere near enough to have caused
those errors. Loaded up a free standing bookmark, it did fine on a layer of
fabric wash-away, with a recycled layer on top, no registry errors at all. So I
have no idea what’s going wrong. Could have tested some badly crafted designs
on poorly chosen stabilizer, or hooped at the wrong tension, or any combination
of any of those.
Needless to say, Tia’s denim
skirt didn’t get sewn today. And I’m worn out from the stress, which sounds stupid,
I know, but there it is. Maybe tomorrow will go better. . .
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