Saturday, July 13, 2013

What's in a name

Sleep all night without waking (a rarity). Get up and do a bit of cleaning. A little bit of creativity, a little bit of outside work. Soon, a glass of wine and pizza. It's been a good day.

My young friend Renae pieced a little wallhanging for a friend of hers who just had her first baby. The little girl has what may be considered a "vintage" name: Eleanor Marian. Personally, I love that the older names are coming back into fashion. They sound so much more dignified than the Disney-princessesque things foisted on little girls by unthinking parents (no offense meant to those of you who have named your children after the Disney princesses, nor to those of you who carry those names - just my opinion here).

Renae wanted her name embroidered on the center block, and rather than doing it by hand, she brought it over to be machine embroidered.

What fun we had!

Picking a font, then sewing out a few samples to get the sizing right for the space. Once that was set, we had to get the stabilizer and quilt top in the embroidery hoop perfectly straight - hard to do when the hoops don't fully open, and you need to insert your fabric in the hoop backwards compared to a normal hooping.

Here it is.
It's not really crooked - it was setting partially on a stack of
things when I took the picture.
It looks a bit wonky here; it was laying on an uneven stack of stuff when I remembered to take a picture. The center block truly is even - it doesn't taper to one side.

The jump stitches, the stitches the machine takes between letters - are not cut here, either. You can see them at the bottom between several of the letters. Rather than shinier polyester embroidery thread, we used a quilting weight cotton thread as more in tune with the muted palate of the rest of the item.

The most difficult part of the process, as mentioned, was hooping. Once everything was hooped, the actual embroidery motif could be moved on screen in the software to center it exactly where it needed to be relative to the boundaries of the block. Were it not for my lousy, quick-remember-to-take-a-picture-before-Renae-leaves photography, you'd see we go it exactly centered.

If we hadn't, though, the motif can be rotated through 360 degrees; if the fabric were hooped at a slant, the embroidery motif could be moved to match it. The wonders of computerized sewing.

I'm finishing up a bit of cleaning, then I'm sitting down with dinner, a movie and a glass of wine. Even though the weather finally says "summer" (80 today, 83 and humid tomorrow, 88 from Monday to Thursday), the sun is moving across the sky noticeably quicker. I'm not really rushing autumn, but I do think it would be nice if it would eventually cool off enough that I want to use the patio. Just too hot to sit out there right now.

1 comment:

melissa said...

Interesting...your quilt block goes with your background on the blog. :) Pretty!

Oldest daughter, Anna, works at a machine embroidery shop, so I understand all of what you've said. Hooping, etc. Yeah, heard it all, and glad I 'get' it.

Enjoy your pizza and wine, sweets.