a favourite shade of blue

a favourite shade of blue

Friday, September 3, 2010

a warning

I embroidered a  knit tee shirt today, and have a couple of pieces of advice for you.  I first encountered an embroidery machine at my friend Gail's home in Phoenix AZ and fell in love!!!
She is a great practitioner of this art and taught me things that I should have remembered. Gail embroiderd a design on a tee shirt and she put two pieces of stabilizer under the shirt along with a floater. Now that was truly a great idea. Well I forgot all about that  trick. I was really excited to find a tearaway in my stabilizer stash And used just one piece on my knit shirt. What was I thinking ;) I did use the clear on the top though so give me points for that one . Because there was only one sheet of stabilizer the design tended to clump and I was really disappointed when the design did not fill in all the spaces. So I have extra white spaces where there should be thread. Fixable ? Yes!  But  I have to go and purchase some fabric pens to colour on those spaces. Another thing I think is a problem when doing knits is the stitch count. This design had 25,000 stitches approximately and it over stitched a bit too much. I learned  these two things today. We need to learn about these things to improve our embroidery. At least I do.
However I did another trick to kind of flatten it out. I sprayed it with water then put a tea towel on it and added a wooden  cutting  board on top of that and then a bowl full of packages of jam to add a bit of weight. and it turned out okay except for the white spaces. Picture coming. :>)
I also cut out some of the animals print pieces, all I needed I think. But we'll see later when I get down to it. Still have to cut out the animal heads I have and/or the animal pictures I showed you earlier in the blog. It will be an issue trying to get 5 inch squares out of that though as they are not swaure. It may be possilbe to cut and then sew some black in the parts that are not 5". It's a  thought.
That was a good part of my day though earlier Ray and I went out for some curried chicken and Tandori chicken. We had not had that before but I loved it. It was so tasty and the chciken was sweet and juicy and just  fell off the bone. And that was in the food court. Who knew?
I bought a new shirt, I'll take a photo of it and Ray bought 2 new shirts. So we had a good day:>)
Have a great evening!!

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