Curly shark

Mon, 08 Jul 2024

This is not the break I'm supposed to be taking. I mean, I am still making good progress on getting the workroom rearranged for video.

After I did the Blue Shark (December '22), I had planned to do a dolphin in a similar style, but got hung up on wanting to give it a curved body (Blue Shark is straight-bodied because BLÅHAJ is straight-bodied). Seeing real dolphins got me thinking about it again and I went "but they can be banana-pose!" - getting the tail below the midline of the belly without catching a seam allowance is doable but more complicated than I usually want to do. So I tried it out on the Blue Shark, and was like "I don't know why I didn't do this earlier" and started to make the dolphin version and then remembered: the tail curve isn't the problem, it's the fact that dolphin tails are horizontal.

Fine: the dolphin tail is another hooping, but, I thought to myself, I'll be saving a hooping from the shark because I'm not doing a belly embroidery and I can still keep it to three hoopings. And so I shuffled the steps around and realized: all the space the shark saved by being curly was given right back by having to fit the back/tail in the same hoop as one of the flippers.

ARGH

I have shelved the Dolphin to let the problem simmer, and as soon as the embroidery machine is on its new stand I will take the pictures for Blue Shark II: Curly Edition. Not that it needs to be there, but if I get sidetracked it'll never make it there and I gotta take that frog video.