Troubles in the Atelier

Sometimes things just don't go your way. Why does that happen? Last week, I had more than my share of mishaps. Mishaps in the sewing room usually cost money and certainly time. Very few of us have an overabundance of both.

Things began as a normal week. On day, I had a doctor's appt. I had some time between the appointment and work so I thought I would multi-task and get a little sewing done while I was getting ready for work. I usually don't leave my machine while it's running. But when you try to squeeze in a project you do what you can. Things were going well. I was working on a shirt for my nephew. I kept running into the sewing room to make sure there were no problems. I started getting more and more confident that I didn't need to babysit my machine. On my final check of the machine, I saw there was indeed a problem. The machine should have finished the design. I thought maybe the bobbin had run out or the embroidery thread broke. No a much bigger problem. My machine had eaten the t-shirt. With the vibration of the machine, the shirt fell in the way of the needle and all hell broke loose. The t-shirt was eventually pulled thru the embroidery foot and the needle broke. I shut the machine off since I was now not going to get this finished in time to go to work. When I had time to look at it, I knew there was no way to salvage the t-shirt. Between the hole that the broken needle made and having to take scissors to get the t-shirt out of the machine, the shirt wasn't wearable.
My camera doesn't take close up pictures so this is pretty blurry. Trust me, there are a couple of puncture holes in the shirt.

A couple of days later, the next great mishap occurred. For those of you who do machine embroidery, it's not a super quick process. Well, at least not for me. I have to find the perfect design, then find the perfect font. Some times it takes a lot of playing with the design and the font to make it work in your hoop. This little burp cloth took a lot of work getting this design to look like this. Pretty special, huh? Well it would be had I spelled the baby's name correctly. So once again, I had to go back to the drawing board and start all over. It was a challenge to get the misspelled name onto the cloth let alone the correct spelling. Live and learn.