Eleanor embroidery

That's one friggin' big stitchery! Each letter is about 4 inches high. The N is actually also 6 inches wide.
One more to go (Amelia).

Better and better

Finally, some good results.
These are 4 inch high letters, each in one of the final fonts.

Climbing a learning curve certainly takes its time

I've been learning more about embroidering large items without creating puckers. It's certainly a challenge, but finally I've made visible progress. I must have stitched more than 15 different samples so far. When this project is done, though, I'm taking a break from doing major projects for others, and just focusing on making good, simple, small quilt labels.

Goal: stitch out several 4 inch high letters, with pretty wide lines.
The fonts initially digitize as satin stitches, and this causes all kinds of puckers if the fabric is insufficiently stabilized, or if any of several other factors are off. Examples are  stitch density, stitch length, fabric quality and thread tension.
The first two pictures below are the successful one, showing a front view and a back view.
The photo at the bottom, the red thread, is an interim step, in which I experimented with several different stitch densities and lengths. This is just a few of the stitchouts I've made so far.

In general, I learned:

• For big dense projects, use iron-on stabilizer whenever possible
• 2 layers of stabilizer placed orthogonally give the best stability
• A relatively short fill stitch (3.5-4 mm) is far better than a wide satin stitch
• Even increasing the stitch spacing from .45 mm to .55 mm makes a visible difference
• Jennie Perkins' Tearaway Magic, an iron-on water soluble stabilizer, is NOT appropriate for this density and size
• With large lettering, add an edge underlay around the letter
• Stitch a basting frame as the first step
• Don't hoop too tightly, just flat and in the hoop is better than a tight hooping

Well, a girl's gotta have something to carry potatoes in

So I thought I'd make this.

I made a pretty! and a couple of cutes!

Learning more about embroidery and design editing. Now it's time to move forward on Ilse's quilts.
Here's the pretty - my own design, uses several special stitches and a fill pattern. Learned to move the first stitch by reshaping the item.

Also stitched a couple of bugs for a baby quilt. They're cute!

Und? Reicht's?

Bestickte Fläche ist ungefähr 5 inch x 9 inch.

Embroidering text along a curved line

Getting my mind turned towards Ilse's baby quilts, and I took the time to learn how to digitize text and align the text along a curve.
In the Bernina Designer Plus V6 software, it's quite easy. The software has Corel Draw as its basic graphics package, so the steps are simple:

1. Use the Art Canvas tab of the software
2. Draw the curve (the freehand tool makes a nice smooth curve)
3. Type the text you want to use
4. Choose the curve you want to align to.
5. Done!

Here's a picture of what I was playing with this morning.

Giant embroidery

Just finished an embroidery for someone else's project. They are making a "They touched the quilts" quilt for an upcoming show, and I got a chance to practice my my multihooping technique by stitching an extra-long sentence. 4 hoopings in the lower sentence.
Here is a picture.

 Also a few pictures from today's mini-retreat.
We like demonstrations, this time folded fabric cranes and T-shirt quilts.
We also like food - had a great potluck lunch.

Salomon's shirts

DH's nephew has the first child of that generation, young Salomon.  He's about 2 years old, and at the sweet instigation of my MIL I embroidered a couple of T-shirts for him.
Nice thing about the embroidery is that it's going better all the time. Even though I stitched a few test designs, I still got those and the final projects done within a couple of hours.
These were my first T-shirts, so I practiced on some other knit fabrics first. With the right stabilizer and a ball point needle, it went off without a hitch.
Here are the test stitchouts (I can use them for decorative items somewhere):

And here are the final products.