Learning Something New

I've been thinking about the Dark Confessor's dress that I am working on and I really have fantastical visions about couture finishing and deep red intricate embroidery around the sleeves and bottom of the skirt.

The problem is that I need to learn to split and align larger designs to really make my vision into reality, something that I've been avoiding because of all the problems my embroidery machine has given me previously.

A little research and tutorial reading has made it obvious that this can be pretty complicated, depending on the pattern that you want to stitch, so I decided to simplify it a little.

Rather than attempt something complicated, I choose an embroidery pattern that would already fit into my hoop in one dimension so that I could split it in two.

I also picked this one because it had unique separate motifs, meaning I didn't have to worry about lining up a fill section. I used the freehand selection to split it into two along the vine line. The red section will stitch first, and then I'll have to rehoop and stitch the blue section.

I think the hardest part of this will be lining up the stitching in the hoop, but I'm hoping that will improve with practice.

Here is the finished first attempt. I think the bottom half is rotated or shifted slightly to the right. You can see where the bottom vine is just touching the top vine and leaf but all in all it didn't come out too bad. For this type of design, it probably doesn't matter too much.

Tomorrow, I'd like to add alignment stitches and see if I can't get it to line up just a little bit better. After that I might do a couple throw away projects from my Craftsy class to get some more practice with alignments.