just a bit of a mish-mash.

i've been working on some rather random stuff lately, but i don't have finished shots of anything yet, so i thought i'd post some teasers...

it might seem like i haven't been doing any needlework, what with the quilt mania goin on around here lately, but that's just because i've been working on one particular project that has taken me soooooo much longer than anticipated!

i'm doing a cross stitch design using waste canvas -


and i also stitched up a cute little sheet to donate to a silent auction for a friend's immigration costs -



back to the quilty stuff, today i finished a project in shades that are SOOO not my usual palette!


and i spent some time making hexagons... so fun!



the other night i did a puzzle with a bunch of friends at one of my favourite places in the world, rhizome cafe. it was supposed to be board game night, but i <3 puzzles more! i've had this puzzle for a while, and it is so PERFECTLY me, but i hadn't actually put it together before. it was totally fun, though it would've been easier with more light - i thought about bringing a lamp, but that felt kind of cheeky!

you know that you're a huge crafty geek when you say things like "no, i need a puzzle piece with a red machine formed glass button, that one's not glass, and it's hand carved" or, "does anyone see more of the molded plastic 40s floral buttons?"!!!


i've been doing some machine embroidery projects as well, and fighting with my machine a lot! i've decided that i need to upgrade to a machine with a larger stitch size capability (5"x7"!! so exciting!!), and i'm torn between sticking with brother, most likely getting the PE-780D or switching over to janome/elna and getting the Elna 8300.

i'm irritated as hell with brother, because this machine has been so frustrating, and honestly, my previous non-embroidery machine was a brother as well, and it had some issues. mostly the problem is that i sew random crap, and put my machines through a lot of stress. since brothers are usually plastic interiors, they don't hold up well to rigorous sewing. in addition, i'm not super fond of the brother dealers in my area - one's in vancouver, and has always been rather snotty, and is a pain in the ass to take machines in to, as they have no designated parking and they're on a super busy street, and the other is about half an hour away from me, and some days they're extremely friendly, but other days they're not, and half the time they don't seem to have any idea what i'm talking about anyway. plus, all of the brother machines come with disney/pixar designs, and i HATE disney, for a multitude of reasons. i don't spend money on any item that will support disney, so why would i spend a large amount of money on something affiliated with the company?

the elna looks fabulous, and i went in today to a dealer who i've gone to in the past for servicing and repair. he's incredibly knowledgeable, almost to the point of information overload! i really like the idea of having a separate embroidery machine, because then i don't have to worry about ruining the embroidery functionality by sewing other projects out of heavy stuff. it has a lot of features that i really like, include the ease of portability compared to the brothers, the estimated time remaining to complete the design, a fancier lcd screen than i have now, etc. and it's metal interior, so it's going to hold up for longer. and i like elna, i've always had good experiences with them, and they have a great reputation. i feel like they're a better company than brother....



the problem is that i've already bought the basic brother design software, and it doesn't work with any other formats. however, it isn't that great of software anyway, and i would need to spend about $1000 to upgrade to the software that does what i actually want to do. i could get the janome digitizer MB, which is pricey as well, but actually does the stuff i want, and does lots of other fun stuff too.

so i'm waffling. but i'm leaving towards the elna.... another perspective is that every single time i go in to tom's sewing machines (the elna dealer) with problems or questions, someone is always available to help me, whether it's tom himself or one of the women who work there. and almost every time i've gone into the Laura's (the brother dealer) with an issue, they've been too busy to help me and have asked me to come back, or there's no one there who knows enough to help.

i'm super excited to have the capability to do larger designs though!! one of the very first things i'm going to make is this lace witch hat from urban threads. and then the lace top hat...


and speaking of witches, and therefore halloween, craftcritique.com is doing a halloween blog carnival! so awesome. i have multiple halloween projects that i need to get a move on to post!

in addition to the projects i was already planning on, i spent hours today googling xmas ideas for a guild project, and lots of them could be adapted to be for halloween instead... remember my halloween wreaths a few years ago? i think i need to make a couple of new ones...

my dream lover(s) list....

first off, happy belated valentine's day y'all! i meant to post this on valentines day, but that weekend was pretty frazzled for me (see my winter olympics post) i actually have valentines to post as well, but they're not quite done yet.... i know, i'm late! i changed directions part way through them, and the end result is much more time intensive. i hope they'll be worth the wait for the folks who'll receive them!

but anyway, back to my dream lover(s) list! i've actually been planning this piece for quite a while, but it wasn't until the submission deadline for an art show loomed close that i actually got my butt in gear.

this is my "artist's statement" for the piece -

Dream Lover(s) Body Pillow
materials: synthetic fabric, rayon thread, invisible zipper, polyfil
40” tall x 15” wide x 9” deep
technique: machine embroidery digitized based on the artist’s own handwriting

aside from physical characteristics, we all have ideas of what our ideal lover(s) is like. we carry a list in our heads, adding entries based on relationships that ended badly (never dating anyone who votes for THAT party again!), editing or removing entries that are no longer necessary, adding entries that reflect how our lives change as time goes by (must have good dis/ability politics now that i’m chronically ill), adding entries as we see patterns in past relationships (no more “putting up with” my gender, i want someone who appreciates it!).

as in the rest of life, rules are made to be broken, but our internal lists serve as a guide, a reminder of great possibilities. they also serve as reminder of negative possibilities, when we’re distracted by a particularly dapper boy and might be tempted to ignore past lessons learned!





i don't know about you, but i've had my list in my head for years now. one day i randomly decided to write it down, and started thinking about how different lines have changed over the years. i had this body pillow that needed a pillow case, and i started thinking how perfect it would be to make the body pillow actually relate to what i'd like in a partner/lover/sweetie/whatever. (does anyone else remember those boyfriend pillows that came out a few years ago?) i contemplated just embroidering the updated list, but i thought that the changes and edits were just as important as the list entries themselves, so i included all of the original list. there are actually a few newer entries that i ran out of room for, like must be poly or open, and crafty (and confident about it).


the base fabric is black ultrasuede, so it's soft but sturdy, and it'll be easy to remove cat hair from (important in my house!). i boxed the corners of the pillow case, and i'm really happy with how that gave the pillow a more distinct shape. i used a black invisible zipper along the bottom seam so that it's removable for cleaning, but doesn't have any sharp or hard pieces like a regular zipper.

so! the list itself!


- black eyeliner (& body mods) while this might seem like a physical characteristic, i kinda see it as an expression of attitude, self expression, etc, and that's why it's on the list
- not in high school (not applicable!) this one is obviously no longer important, cause i'm not into people that young, but when i was 17, it was definitely relevant!
- has a car/takes transit (independent) basically, they need to be independent, hence the added note. this was on the list after dating too many people who didn't drive OR take transit, and i was really freaking tired of always being the one to travel!


- gives great massages (maybe not. kinda creepy?) this has actually been on the list for soooo long, and i always thought it would be so awesome to date someone who gave good massages, but now that i actually go to massage therapy once or twice every week as a form of medical treatment, i think it might be kinda creepy to also get massages from someone who i'm involved with. i don't know, it's just a thought. remember that friends episode where phoebe can't massage monica anymore because mon won't stop making sex noises? yeah.
- not vanilla. i'll leave this one alone, cause my mom reads my blog.... ;) but basically, i'm pretty flexible as long as someone isn't TOTALLY vanilla...
- gives backwards hugs (without prompting) because if you have to ask, it doesn't mean as much (see prev entry too!) i'm a huge sucker for backwards hugs. even some of my favourite pictures of me and friends are ones where they're giving me a backwards hug
- likes cats (!!!) always important, but even more so after i dated a dog lover and decided that the dog/cat distinction was a pretty good gauge of character! i just get along with cat people better ;)
- good dis/ability politics pretty self explanatory, i think. if you use ableist language, i'm sure as hell not gonna sleep with you! and yes, "lame" is totally abelist, whether you wanna admit it or not.


- id's as queer (if they're queer) the note on this one kinda felt like a no brainer, obv someone who id's as straight wouldn't id as queer! but the entry itself is super important to me. i consider queer to be a political identity as well as a sexual identity and a possible gender identity, and it's really important to me that someone who i'm with has at least similar politics. because frankly, i have very little respect for people who don't care about the world around them, and i wouldn't want to be with them.
- appreciates (and understands) femme other queer femmes will totally back me on this, it sucks to be with someone who tolerates your gender. and sadly, it happens way too fucking often
- good gender politics this one kinda relates to the list entry above, but it also relates to the person themselves, that they have good personal gender politics, in that they've consciously thought about their own gender, and it relates to the people around them, in that transphobia and genderqueerphobia are total turn offs!
- no kids (OR good parent/person separation) um, i spelt separation wrong, didn't i? shit! oops. back to the point itself, it's pretty self explanatory. i don't think it's healthy for you or for your child if your entire life revolves around them.


i think this piece took almost as long to digitize as it did to stitch, or at least it felt like it! i wrote out the list on paper with a sharpie, then scanned it, then separated out each line, edited the letters to sharpen edges so that they'd digitize well, created pdfs for some reason, turned them back into jpegs, separated them into even smaller files, because they had to be less than 4"x4", blah, blah, blah, then used PE Design Lite to digitize them.

i lost track of how many times it had to be rehooped, but it was A LOT. i used a larger hoop and for a few places just had to slide it along. but every line had a minimum of 3 files to embroider in red, some had 4. and then there were the second layer of white lines, the "notes" on the list. and then i did all of the dashes and arrows individually after the fact, because i decided they needed to be there!

catch up post #4! machine embroidered ornaments!

every year i try to send a little something out with my cards. it doesn't always happen, but i try! it needs to be something fairly flat, so my postage bill isn't ridiculous, and it needs to be something that will take the abuse of the mail (which is ALWAYS worse around the holidays!).

this year i decided to machine embroider something (of course!).

i absolutely love vintage glass ornaments, i have a ridiculous collection of them (huge!). most of mine are just simple balls, but i love all the shapes and sizes that were made. i decided to draw up some vintage ornaments and then digitize them.

this took a lot of fiddling between photoshop and PE Design. i edited the images constantly, testing them digitized, until i got them perfect (now you see why i was lazier for the gift card holders?!). even though i embroidered them all in one colour, i made the files multi coloured, so that i could better control which stitch was used for each part of the ornament. when the image used in PE Design is all one colour, the software wants to use the same stitch for the entire thing. i wanted to switch between the fill stitch and the satin stitch, so this is what one of my files looked like -


and the ornaments themselves -


i embroidered as many as i could fit on each piece of felt, and then after embroidering, i lay another piece behind them and stitched around each ornament. i trimmed them, and added a grommet to hold the ribbon. i really love how they turned out.




i wanted to do some non-traditional colours too!






crows, of course!







i have a couple of friends who celebrate hanukkah either instead of or in addition to christmas, so i made star of david ornamants for them.



i was really happy with how they turned out, and they were pretty easy to do! i think i made around 50 in total, and i've only got a couple left!

catch up post #3! machine embroidered gift card holders

i was machine embroidering like crazy this christmas! since i've had the PE Design Lite digitizing software, i haven't purchased any designs online, or even used any of the design cards that i already have. if i get an idea, i just open up photoshop, create the file, and then digitize it. so far it's been working great, with a few little quirks!

i decided to make embroidered gift tags for my cousins, because my extended family has created a tradition of walmart gift cards for holidays. they live in a pretty small town, so there's not much else to chose from! i didn't actually get them done in time for them to be used this year (because we have to mail their cmas package out ahead of time), but i'm sure we'll be sending them the same thing next year!!




the original file

the finished result


the original file

the finished result. as you can see, the stars didn't really stay star shaped, unfortunately


the original file

the finished result. again, the polka dots didn't stay perfectly round when digitized, and i ended up losing one of them, because the stitching started to unravel.

there were definitely quirks, but quite honestly, i probably could have fixed them, but i didn't. i was getting tired of the fiddling by this point! i think they turned out cute, and since they'll never see the original files, they won't know that they didn't turn out exactly as expected!

catch up post #2! more baby goodies!!

my best friend's baby is a year old now, so he's getting a bit too old for the drool size bibs, and he needs more coverage now that he's learning to feed himself!

i'd been thinking about making vinyl bibs for a while, and i finally got around to it in time for christmas.

i digitized all of the designs using PE Design Lite software, and then machine embroidered them. PE Design Lite doesn't have a whole lot of font options (30 or so), so i created files in photoshop with the words, and then digitized them.

this image is from a wingding font, i think it was 80s themed. the design took FOREVER to stitch, well over half an hour, and it stretched the vinyl out quite a bit, even with the stabilizer, which was irritating.


when i gave it to them, the mom said "you'll never know what this is, but i will!" it's true, i didn't even think of that!



it's backed with brightly striped flannelette. i LOVE this vinyl, it's the same stuff i used for the vinyl octopus last winter. it's got great depth to the colour, it's almost pearlescent.

this one was a wingding as well, though i forget which font it was. halloween maybe?


i just wanted a gothier type design!



it's backed in a skull print flannelette that i bought at joanns on halloween for 70% off. they only had about a yard left, not enough for a bigger project.

this one is a sublime stitching pattern that's been digitized, it was one of the samples i posted when i first started playing with the software




it's backed with the same skull flannelette.

glitter vinyl!





this one is backed with a star patterned cotton, because i didn't have a flannelette that matched.

their family celebrates "gothmas" in addition to the christmas that the extended family celebrates (his mom hates the tackiness of christmas), so i HAD to make him a gothmas bib!


i'm really irritated that the "mas" isn't straight, but i wasn't going to restitch all the rest of it (or waste the metallic thread i'd already used!).


the holly is embroidered in metallic thread. i think the silver was coats and clark, and the red was gutermann. i stitched the leaves twice, because the silver thread broke and it was really obvious where i rethreaded it. going over it again covered that up and made the colour a lot more dense.

after i embroidered the writing, i went back and carefully stitched around each letter with the metallic thread to tie it in to the holly better. i think i'm crazy, it took forever!


it's backed with a black cotton that has silver holly printed on it. i didn't like how thin the cotton was on the backing of the glitter vinyl bib, so i added a layer of black flannelette between the vinyl and the cotton on this one.

WAHOO!! my new toy! (and sublime stitching!)

so! i mentioned that i made a rather big purchase at the sewing machine/fabric store.... i bought PE Design Lite!

it was ridiculously expensive, and i totally couldn't afford it, and i totally shouldn't have bought it, but i did, and it's so much fun, so whatever. i borrowed the money to buy it, and i'll be paying it back over the next few months, and i think it's worth the smaller craft budget i'll have in the meantime.

i had to order it, and then wait impatiently for it to arrive (patience is not my strong suit!) i was just going to buy the PED Basic so that i could download patterns cause that was about $300 less, but it's been discontinued in canada, and the woman at my brother dealer totally convinced me that the PE Design Lite was worth it to be able to make my own simple designs. i was originally told that the PED Basic was discontinued, period, and was rather irritated to discover that it wasn't really, it was just discontinued in canada, but i don't think she was trying to lie to me, i think she just didn't know, because when i told her the price i was seeing from US sellers, she said it was because it was discontinued. but this is good anyway, it's way more fun than the PED Basic would have been!

it's really fun, and it'll do for now, and it's giving me an opportunity to experiment with the Brother software without buying the $1000 PE Design 8. i've been playing around with it a bit, and it definitely has some limitations, though i'm not sure if the limitations are due to my lack of knowledge, or the software itself - a combo of the two is most likely i think. i need to go back to the brother with my samples and see if they have any suggestions. i'm rather intrigued by Embird as well, as it's much less expensive than the PE Design 8, so i might try switching to that whenever i decide to upgrade (not going to be any time soon though!).

after playing around a bit, i used it to digitize Sublime Stitching patterns for machine embroidery, and while some of the results weren't as good as i'd hoped, some of them turned out awesome! i was getting really frustrated trying to get the images "good enough" for the software to process them (it seems rather temperamental), but a friend gave me some tips on how to adjust the images in photoshop (i found the "stroke" option, and my paint bucket isn't hiding anymore! wahoo!), so i'm getting a lot better results. (all of the coloured in designs were coloured in photoshop before digitizing) my first ones were MUCH worse than these!

from the black apple pattern set
outline only

(i obviously forgot to trim that thread before i scanned it!)
coloured in

(there's entirely too much space between the outline and the colour, they should be butting up against each other. i don't know how to fix that. and i messed up and set the shirt and the hair to embroider in fill stitch, which i don't like as much as satin stitch, especially for the hair, because i think it looks like he has a buzz cut!)

outline only

coloured in

(i don't feel like the colour is consistent - like it's not filled in enough. i don't know. i think there's a way to adjust that, i just haven't figured it out yet!)

from the forest friends pattern set
outline only hedgie

(i did this one before i figured out how to change the stroke size in photoshop, and i think the outline is a bit too narrow. he'd pop a lot more if the lines were a bit thicker i think)

outline only deer

deer with some colouring

(crappy scan, i'm sorry! the scanner hates the khaki brown i used. but the colour matches up with the outlines really good in this one!)

from the sexy librarians pattern set
glasses


typewriter

(look at all that white space between the colour and the border! argh! and i cut one of the pink satin stitched threads while trimming the black threads! whoops! i'm going to go back and edit the pattern so that the keys of the typewriter are sewn first, then i can stop and cut all those threads BEFORE the body of the typewriter is embroidered!)

from the vital organs pattern set

(this one turned out SO GOOD! i love it!!)

and this one's not from a sublime stitching pattern, it was a freebie i downloaded online. it's designed to be embroidered with a much heavier thread, so it doesn't cover as well, but i like the design. i don't know anything at all about embroidering with wool, like this design called for, it's something else to look into!


so it's fun. super time consuming, but definitely fun! i need to find the rest of my sublime stitching patterns (there's a reason why these are all newer designs, that's all i could find!). from what i can see on the sublime stitching website, it's A-OK to do these, because they're based on patterns i've already purchased and these aren't for sale or anything like that. i've been trying to use clipart as well, but scanning the images seems to work better.