Well, I've managed to begin the sewing of the tree at last. It's a mammoth task. Just an example is, this morning, it took me from 6.45am till 7.45am and then after I got Shaun out to school, from 8.45am till now - 9.24am JUST TO HOOP THE FABRIC IN THE RIGHT PLACE! 1.75 hours just to line the pattern up to the last portion.
While I was typing this, I just noticed that the pattern for the roots, was actually around 1mm too low - so I've just had to stop the machine (after it sewed 3934 stitches) and realign it so it matches up to the top part of the trunk. It will now take this small portion of the tree (part of the roots) 85 minutes just to sew - barring thread breaks and other wee minor setbacks.
I've actually already sewed 5 other parts of the tree up till now - and all of them were as difficult as each other to place and line up.
The most difficult so far was the branch around the bottom of the work "Flourish". Because it is so close to the motto, I had to watch it carefully to make sure it wouldn't sew over the top of the wording. Well, it did! 3 times I had to stop the machine and make adjustments to the pattern in the software and try to pick up where it had left off. A row of stitches actually sewed over the top of the "h" and a bit of the branch just clipped the bottom of the "F". By this time it was too late to do anything about it, so I had to add a bit of gold to the top of the branch so that it looks as if the "F" was sewed after the branch.
Ahh, the joys!
The main thing is that I'm not as apprehensive about sewing the tree any more. There are stitches that have to be unpicked - although this is not because of anything I did with the patterns. A strange thing happened yesterday morning.
I set the trunk of the tree off to sew - and made the mistake of going and leaving it to attend a meeting at Shaun's school about his future - either at school or college - at 9am.
When I came back around 11am, the machine had actually lost its calibration mid pattern and was sewing the trunk about 3 inches below where it should have been! Fortunately, a thread broke and it didn't actually finish sewing the pattern.
I Haven't a clue how this happened, or why it happened, but it left me with another headache! It took me the whole of the rest of the day (till after 9pm) to try and recover from this. I still have a large portion of sewing on the fabric that shouldn't be there, but hopefully the roots of the tree will cover it up - if not, out comes the stitch-picker! :-(
Anyway, I'm off now to check my roots...
May xx
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