A Finish, A Disaster, and A Smart Cookie

We have another block finish for Affairs of the Heart! The purple hearts are supposed to have embroidery swirls, but I left them off because I liked the fussy cutting and didn't want to obscure the fabric.

A few nights ago while embroidering, I discovered that the bobbin thread had caught, the needle had broken, and the hoop had popped off the machine, leaving me with a huge tangled mess that I literally had to saw off at the presser foot. So yesterday, I sat down and attempted to realign the stitching which is something that you never want to do. Ever. Some of it went perfect and some went just terrible.

This is where I restarted the embroidery

You can see from the picture below that I was able to get the legs, tail, and wing lined up pretty well but the head and neck are a problem. I plan on taking the gold thread and using my darning foot to try to fill in the places that are a little sketchy and I'll just have to hope for the best.

I did check out an estimate of how much it would cost to have these done professionally and it would be at least $30-$40 per person, so I will go ahead and try to finish them, hoping for the best. I think I learned a few things from this that will help prevent it in the future.

Anyway, Astrid spent the night last night and watched me attempting to fix the dragon and was very curious about the embroidery machine, so I taught her how to use it. She choose three different patterns and picked fabrics and colors for them. By the time we were done, she was able to rethread the machine by herself, manipulate positioning, and select the patterns. She's an extremely smart cookie and caught on very quickly.

Meanwhile, while she was working on that, I got OCD about my thread rack and put it in color-betical order.

Its so shiny!

I've also been working on my butterflies for the last two weeks and I'm just about ready to phase them back out of the rotation. I may work on Gandalf or I may pick up Fall Fairy again.

Before

As of 03/22/2015

Stitch from stash update coming soon (I was really bad this month, I'll tell you the whole story later) and hopefully a few surcoat finishes before too long.