I thought I might start a journal on my life with Elvis ...
to help me see that its not always going to be hell and things might even get better ...
So week one and Elvis is in the building ... He's all settled in his room and I've had a play...
Things I have discovered .....
His jumpsuit is cheap, tacky and doesn't fit .... at all.
And I am unable to make him one that does ... Fail One !
Hooping is difficult ... the stitch and tear moves independently to the fabric and the couple of things I have embroidered, puckered .... Fail Two!!
But is this because I cant hoop or because of the density of stitching ???
He is very noisy; Is that normal or is it me ????
I wanted to make a thank you card for my Auntie Gell featuring a Snail (she gave me some really lovely, expensive and effective Snail jelly face cream for my birthday)
I tried to import a Snail clip art design into the PES library, my pictures library, my desktop, anywhere .... FIVE times yet cant find it anywhere ... Fail Three !!!
Failing to find my design of a snail I settled on a Frog (?) from the PES design library ....
He has a speech bubble that I thought I could insert "I sure wish I were a snail" into ....
So I bring up some text but the words don't fit unless I make them so small you cant read them.
The words are in a text box on the computer, If I make the text box the same size as the speech bubble,
surely they will 'wrap' ... No! they won't !
After much throcking*, I managed to bring up another text box and split the sentence into two and with much clicking and dragging, position the words within the speech bubble ... They are still pretty small tho'!
Attempt One ...... was going pretty well until I noticed that the outline was off from the embroidered body of my Snailfrog!
I admit I might have pulled the fabric a bit tighter between colour one and colour two as it looked like the stabiliser and fabric were separating, so feeling it was probably my fault, I abandoned the stitch and hooped up another piece of fabric. This time I used a heavy fusible stabiliser.
The bobbin looks pretty empty so I thought I should wind a new one before I started attempt two, I failed !
Attempt two came to a halt fairly early as the bobbin thread, because of the woeful wind, broke away ... it still carried on stitching though ... Is it meant to do this???
The bobbin thread came out all soft, springy and tangled around the edges and ruined my second attempt at the thank you card. This almost had me in tears so I stepped away from Elvis and had a drink (and No, I wont tell you what time it was)
I looked up a youtube tut from an American lady who had the same problem (not just me then) and discovered that Brother, in all their wisdom, leave you to decide when to stop winding the bobbin yourself; there is no auto stop feature but (crucially) they don't tell you this! They leave you to waste an entire bobbin's worth of thread before you work it out. There is also a tricky manoeuvre with a tension disc that a pictogram really doesn't explain at all well.
I went back upstairs and shredded an entire bobbins worth of thread from the brother bobbin (those bent embroidery scissors are very good for this) and started again ... armed with the knowledge gleaned from the vid. I wound a perfect bobbin.
Attempt Three. I used tear away this time as the fusible had been put away and I was losing the will to live. I started it off and stood beyond the yellow tape I had erected to keep myself from touching, nay even breathing on the delicate lil snowflake. All went well until the outlining and again it was off ... I had not touched the fabric, hoop or controls so there is definitely something a tad off (?) but I thought it was 'close enough' and carried on.
Finally after hours of googling nonexistent tutorials on how to work Elvis, how to load designs through PES Software, how to do just about everything I have finished stitching a thank you card for my Auntie Gell.
Ten minutes with a scalpel , some cardstock and some sticky later and its in the post!
I came out of all this feeling very despondent! Not at all how I imagined playing with Elvis would make me feel!
*
http://tmoliff.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/throcking-participial-vb.html