I sold the last of the Pernese dragons in the Etsy shop this weekend; there are still a couple of non-Pernese ones left. I’ll restock a little when I make the instructional photos for the design, but that’ll probably be it (though the kid has expressed a little interest in piecework, and presumably they’ll be available from other sellers using the design).
In any event, it was to a repeat buyer so since she already had a Renegades of Pern key fob, I needed a second. This one’s the primary dragon of the cover of Dragonquest so he’s a little more detailed (more than the stitching can capture at this size). I’ve put up all four variations on the Dragonrider Snap Tab page.
Just because sometimes I struggle with my attention issues doesn’t mean I can’t have a sense of humor about it. I used to have this on a T-shirt (bought at a quilting show – the rare hobby I somehow have not gotten into… yet) and was reminded of it recently. And another impulse project was born.
As much fun as I’ve had doing (relatively) conventional things on the embroidery machine, my real intention has been to use it as a sort of CNC machine. One of the first tests I did of this capability was with a single-color version of the venerable Flower Bear pattern.
A large part of teddy bear/jointed plush sewing is simply putting two flat pieces together and sewing around them. That makes it ideally suited to in-the-hoop work. Of course, the rest of the sewing means matching some very different pieces together — foot pads, head gusset. This can be challenging on a sewing machine, virtually impossible on an embroidery machine (I’m still trying!), but pretty easy when hand-sewing. In the small scale of Flower Bear, it’s not too onerous.
Hoop up a piece of stabilizer, then put down two pieces of fabric right-sides-together on top. Although it’s hard to see here, I’m using an upholstery velvet — what you’re seeing is the coarse white woven backing.
A smarter person would have gotten a picture of the stitchout without all the clutter, but not me. Clockwise from the upper left is the body (with a turning opening), the ears, the arms, and the legs. In the middle there’s a little S-squiggle that is the chin seam. That’s the only part of the head that is sewn flat. You’ll need the pattern from the link above, because you’ll have to transfer some markings to the fabric. The arm and leg joint centers are pretty easy, but the head is a little more challenging.
There are two ways to transfer the head markings. Either way, you’ll want to match up the pattern to the chin seam, so I cut the seam allowance on the pattern away. If you want to transfer the cutting line, perhaps because you have a light-colored fabric, trace that like this.
I recommend transferring the stitching line, though, which means cutting on that line on your pattern and tracing around it. I use a Sharpie here which seems counter-intuitive but on this fabric it just rides on top of the backing fibers and doesn’t come through to the pile at all. Test your fabric first, though. Worst case, if you end up with Sharpie on a finished piece, guess what? “Permanent” markers aren’t all that permanent: rubbing alcohol will re-dissolve the ink. If you work quickly, before the alcohol evaporates, you can rinse the color out.
You’ll need to transfer the foot pads and gusset to another piece of fabric.
Now cut around everything. Don’t forget whether you’re cutting on the cutting line, or around the seam line. Starting at the bottom of the chin should help remind you.
Most of the rest of the instructions are in the link above. Exception: you may have noticed that the arms and legs have no turning opening. Cut a slit just big enough to get the joint disc through, then whipstitch the slit closed around the pin.
If you’re making a proper Flower Bear, or if you have a 4×4 machine, you’ll want to shuffle the pattern pieces around. The SVG is in the archive. If you have trouble using Inkstitch, let me know and I’ll generate a version with the changes you need.
I spent most of today bouncing back and forth between failing to get the Etsy shop up and running and failing to get Mew’s tail turned. (Long skinny tubes of very plush faux fur are no fun.) I needed a quick little success.
I’m not thrilled with the colors, but I picked from what I had already unwrapped, and as you can see my first round was worse. I’d go with a gold clasp, and more bronze/less rust in the darker color, which you can do yourself with the Marvelous Star free embroidery patterns. Tag me if you post a picture of your version.
Back when I made the Black Panther (no, not the Marvel version) someone on Mastodon observed that the embroidered paw pads would make good key fobs. So I stitched up a few: cat, dog, and fox. And then tore off a fingernail unsnapping one. It’s been a Monday, you guys!
I’ll add a few more critter paws (ferret, wolf, whatever else strikes my fancy) and soon I’ll put those in the free pattern section too.
Did I work on the hand sewing yesterday? Nope. Did I work on Mew today? Nope.
Instead, I worked on getting some bookshelves cleared off and rearranged. And I thought to myself, “I’m going to take this tall one out of the living room where it doesn’t fit, and use it to store my active fabric stash so I’m not burrowing through tubs of fabric.
“Fabric… stash. STASH PANDA! I MUST MAKE A STASH PANDA!”
(Karen’s brain, ladies and gentlemen.)
The pattern needs a little fine-tuning (gonna make the hind feet more properly trash panda-ish) and then I’ll publish it, but this one will be the guardian of my fabric stash… as soon as I figure out where to put that shelf.
Although I keep telling myself I didn’t
get the embroidery machine to do conventional embroidery, I keep finding
myself doing conventional embroidery. In large part it’s learning how
the thing behaves with different materials, and also yielding to the
temptation to make cute stuff for my nieces.
It started when I sent my sister a link to a possible teacher gift and she sent back a link to a unicorn book band on that site, for one daughter’s school agenda.
I asked her what she wanted for her planner, and she said a heart, so I went all-in on hearts.
I wrote about the origin of these spiders on Monday, so I’m happy to say I have a finished pattern and not just another unfinished item to add to my to-do list. It’s designed as an in-the-hoop pattern for an embroidery machine but you can also sew it with a conventional machine and use safety eyes.
After the upgrade to WordPress, I moved the pattern to a permanent home in the Free Patterns section: The Jumping Spider. Look for it there now.
Yesterday’s pattern development kind of encapsulates how I work.
I decided to release the in-the-hoop dragon as a pattern on Etsy,
which meant I needed some pictures for the instructions. I cut some
kelly-green minky squares and went through the process. I gave it orange
eyes because St. Patrick’s Day is coming up and I was thinking Irish
flag. And the more I worked with it the less I liked that green, until I
realized it was the unnatural green of a plush Cthulhu.
It only took encouragement from one person to get me haring off on an
in-the-hoop Cthulhu, even though there are already way too many chibi
Elder Gods out there already.
I rushed things a little too much and, in the process of changing the
pattern entirely between colors, managed to mis-align the eye-shines:
As I went to throw away the goof, I went “ha ha looks like a cute
little jumping spider instead” and, well, my heart really wasn’t in
Cthulhu anyway.
Transferring embroidery files to the Brother requires writing them to
a USB stick, carrying it over to the embroidery machine, and plugging
it in. Doesn’t seem hard, right? Except there’s an annoying bug in my
Linux desktop that means ejecting the USB drive sometimes disables the
entire USB port. A normal person would just use the command line, but
no, I have to make things complicated.
A Raspberry Pi Zero is a single-board computer. Add a case, a microSD
card (its “hard drive”), and a USB cable or connector and it’s around
$20-30. It has a mode called Mass Storage Gadget in which it pretends to
be a USB stick to anything plugged into its USB port. It also has
onboard wifi, meaning I can log into it from my desktop machine. Put
those two together, and I can just transfer files to my embroidery
machine via wifi.
Right now it’s still super-nerdy (it involves a lot of command-line,
uh, commands) but when I put together a drag-and-drop interface for it
I’ll post the how-to and a downloadable image.
I got an early Christmas present (or maybe a very late one, since I
have been pricing them out for a year): a Brother PE800 embroidery
machine. If you follow me on Mastodon
you will have seen me flitting around like a butterfly with ADHD from
trial project to trial project, none of which I’ve finished:
Aside from the plushie — a soapybacon pattern — all of the embroidery files are ones I made myself. I think I’ve sung the praises of Inkscape before, but I’ll do it again. It’s a vector drawing program. Think Adobe Illustrator, but… free.
(Well, donor-supported. I threw in $60 this year which is a quarter what Illustrator would cost. But there’s no nag of any kind.)
I use it as a sort of CAD program to draw patterns. I can measure
seam lengths to make sure pieces will fit together, even if the seam
lines are completely different paths. I can re-color designs by changing
a single value, to get variations on pegasus wings or whatever else I’m having Spoonflower print these days. And now, with the Ink/Stitch plugin, I can generate embroidery files to sew those patterns for me.
My husband has suggested I also use it to produce files to have the Cameo cut the fabric, but I’m not ready for a complete robot takeover yet. But yes, I used Inkscape to create the cutting files for the papercraft Lego.
At any rate, it’s a Friday, so here’s a free “sewing” pattern: the
D.Va badge. It’s a single color, so it was a good learning process. I
didn’t have stabilizer yet so my sample stitch drifted slightly (the ear
on the right is properly centered in its border in the file),
but otherwise it came out nicely. Here is the original SVG file so you
can look at the process. Ink/Stitch does a pretty fair job automatically
but I fixed the sharp corners on the border, which otherwise don’t make
a clean turn, and added the underlay which for some reason Ink/Stitch
doesn’t default to. If you look at the comparison of the badge with someone else’s embroidery you can see the difference when an underlay is used in satin stitching.
Ink/Stitch can export in a lot of different embroidery formats so if
you need something different or if you want to re-size it go ahead and
install Inkscape/Stitch and give it a try.
