It's Beginning To Look A Little Like Christmas

For the last few years, most of my time has been spent in designing and making quilts.  It has been--and continues to be--something that feeds my spirit and enriches my life.  I would hate it if I couldn't do it.  But, you know, sometimes you just want to do something a little different.  When I learned that my friends Corky, Janice and Cindy were going to head up to Accent Sewing in Murrell's Inlet to embroider this 20" high Santa, well, I was interested in going also.  I've done a fair amount embroidery but never a design with multiple hoopings (9, as it turned out). The thing that's pretty challenging in doing an embroidery with multiple hoopings is the need for accuracy--and patience.  You can't just slap the fabric into a hoop and expect it to turn out right.  You actually have to measure--which is sort of difficult sometimes for an "eyeballer" like me.  It was time to change my ways.

 Before we could begin our class, we had to buy supplies.  Accent Sewing is a Bernina dealership--a REALLY good dealership--and they were well-stocked with anything we might need (and some things that we didn't strictly NEED but seemed to jump right into our shopping bags.  Here are Corky and Janice discussing the merits of a set of designs for another quilt.  With a 25% discount on embroidery designs that day, it was hard to resist.  (I succumbed a little myself).

I wish I could say that we just breezed through our embroidery on Santa.  It was, after all, mostly applique which meant there wasn't nearly as much stitching as in a regular embroidery design.   There was, as it turned out, a LOT of angst in between the beginning and the end and you can see the elation  on Janice's face as she and Corky held up their Santas for the camera.  FINALLY.  And the next two pictures are of a little closer view.

 

 And where, you might ask, is mine?  Well, as you can see in the picture on the right, I encountered a problem early in the process.  Things went along pretty good until I got to Santa's red pants legs.  At that point, the thread kept getting jammed up in the bobbin case and no amount of fiddling around was successful.  After a while, Bob-the owner and mechanic extraordinaire--called a halt to the process and decided to give my machine the once-over.  Which meant I was through for the day.  Things did work out though.  He fixed the problem and I embroidered my Santa a couple of days later. 

I think he turned out pretty good.  And I've included a close-up of his face so you can see the detail.  We all agreed that we would like to make another one sometime--but not this year.  I think we've had enough "Ho, Ho, Ho" to last us for a while.  But, in the meantime, I might have a design that would look good on a hand towel and another that would jazz up a sweatshirt and one that would maybe go on a bag of goodies . . .