Hail Akron!

Last Saturday was the Garb Party. We are trying to get everyone garbed up for the 2015 Dagorhir season.

I started by making working copies of the pattern and getting everyone to cut out their own pieces. Then, they pinned while I raced them through my serger. From about 2:30 pm to 5:30 pm we made seven surcoats.

This was the digital mock up that by computer savvy / graphics design guru of a husband put together for me.

And here is my physical mock up, embroidered dragon and all!

It does of course, need finishing and then I intend to rent it out to people who show up for practice without garb.

Getting the dragon designed with my embroidery software was significantly less painful than I thought it would be.

The first pattern I stitched out looked...eh... okay, but the outlining didn't show up and the stitch fill was sketchy on the edges.

Back to the drawing board, and a little bit of time and a few changes later, my Embird software produced this beauty:

Okay sure, not quite perfect professional quality but I still think its darn good! And I'm not quite sure how to fix that little overlap on the tail, because it doesn't show up on the graphics so for now, we're going to roll with this and I will start embroidering it on everyone surcoats.

However, I decided to start on the mock up and see how it embroidered out, and I'm glad I did. Not only do I have a slightly better idea of where to locate the emblem, but you can see that somehow, the embroidery shifted near the end and the head and neck of the dragon have an improperly placed outline.

A quick trip into the world of internet research later (proper stablizer, check, proper hooping, check!), I determined that the embroidery arm had likely bumped something on the table and shifted the arm out of calibration. I have all my embroidery machine accessories and assorted gizmos on that table.

Jack was able to hang up my shelf last night and now I have a nice place to keep all my embroidery machine gadgets - I just have to remember not to pile the clean table with stuff!

My plans to get these embroidered tonight were just derailed by the fact that the company I ordered the thread from sent me bobbin thread in black and white instead of embroidery thread in black and gold, so now I have to get the wrong stuff returned and the right stuff delivered. I feel like I should be making some wisecrack about a dress right now.