A humbling day

 

I've NO ONE to blame but myself. But I just made TWO very costly mistakes. The first one is that I was writing this morning and totally forgot to save the file, and then when I went to save it - WORD froze, and I lost all the work. Someone sent me an article which I still need to read about technology woes. Perhaps I should read it now. But here's the thing - the Autosave in Word no longer works the same way that it used to. 

If I want to use Autosave, it will save my document on the Microsoft drive in the cloud. I do NOT want the document on that cloud. Not because of security, but just because I want it on my hard disk. Is there a conspiracy going on here? I need to check it a bit more later today, but well, that puts me behind by an hour or so. Not such a huge deal as it was the rough draft, and I'm sure I can come up with that again. 

Seriously? AutoSave only works on OneDrive or SharePoint Online???

Silly me for not saving the document the moment I opened it. 

But what happened yesterday is a bit more of an issue. I got a customer quilt quilted, and all was good. 

Customer quilt - DONE

Then I went to load the second quilt as I really wanted to get another quilt done to keep on track. OH MY GOSH - I even found another GOLD thread on that quilt. It for sure, came from me, but how???

Another gold thread

The second quilt got loaded, and I set up the dimensions, and I was away. It's a big quilt (of course) at almost 80" wide. The pattern is a bit of a complicated one, and it flows in a wave pattern on the screen. 

When I went to roll the quilt to do the second row, I realized that I had made a fatal error. The pattern was too wide to fit in the safe area. Even if I had the absolute maximum area marked and trust me, I went back and enlarged the safe area to the maximum, the pattern was just less than 1" too big. It didn't show up on the first row as the top of the pattern was cut off. Are you kidding me? NOPE!

So now, I have to rip out EVERYTHING that I stitched. Yes - a dense pattern and 80 inches of it! GRRR!  I'm about 1/3 of the way, and I couldn't take any more last night. 

Ripping out the quilting on the long arm

I didn't take the quilt off the machine. There's no need to do that, but I've lowered it so I can use the table as a surface. Of course, the tension is perfect, and well, it's just time-consuming to rip out. But again, I can blame NO ONE but me. Well, there's another checkpoint to watch for when I use these wavy patterns. I hope to get it ripped out today during Monday sewing. And then it'll have to be quilted tomorrow. But that puts me way behind now. Oh boy. 

I did get out for a long walk yesterday. And I spotted some dandelions. Don't they know that winter is almost here? I guess they were totally unfazed by the snow we had last week. 

Dandelions

Let's say that ONE thing at least worked out well yesterday. I've wanted to do this embroidery project for a while. I bought my threads a couple of weeks ago and well, yesterday seemed like a good day to experiment. 

I actually had to leave the Designer EPIC 2 stitching when I went to bed, and I prayed that there was enough bobbin thread. I used up two full bobbins before I went to bed. I woke up this morning and checked the machine to find this message. You can't read that, but it says, "Embroidery is Finished." So that was a positive thing. 

Embroidery is finished

The file contained over 212,000 stitches!!! Yikes - when I initially started it, it was going to take over 8 hours to stitch, and I started at about 4 PM. Then it quickly settled down, and it took over 5 hours to stitch out. 

What was I stitching? Here's a sneak peek. 

Sneak peek of my embroidery file

This is what I saw this morning. Of course, I had to stitch that out in the 360mm by 260mm hoop. Go big or go home!!! Good morning M!!!!  I wonder where her good looks came from? 

My finished embroidery of M

Here's a close-up of the stitching so you can see that it's made up totally of lines. I used a photograph of M. It's one of my favorites, and it's a headshot that she uses in her portfolio. I contemplated removing some of the detail in the background, but I decided to leave it. I did a wee bit of playing with the original photo's saturation, but it's mostly intact. I LOVE THIS. I created the file using the PhotoStitch Wizard in the mySetnet Embroidery Software. The same Wizard feature is in the original Premier +2 Ultra Software. 

The picture is made up of lines

This is what the back of the embroidery looks like. There's just one blip on her neck, which is when I had to change the bobbin, but I'll get rid of that later today. Note to self - remove the Jump Stitch function when doing the Linear art. 

The back of my linear photo stitch

It looks just like the real photo! I'm so impressed for several reasons. It was so easy to create the file. It was super easy to stitch out, and the end result is awe-inspiring and realistic. I see many more of these in my future!

The linear embroidery looks like a real photograph

Well, this brings up a whole lot of other ideas. Now, if I'd stop messing up, I'd have a bit more time! I can't believe that I screwed up twice. Oh well, there's NO time to worry about it. I just listened to an audiobook while I was ripping out, and the time passed fairly quickly. However, it's back-breaking work, so I can't stay at it too long, and I would have done more last night, but I was getting tired. 

Now, who can I do a photo stitch of next?? I need another model. Oh - I can hear the girls yelling - Pick ME!! Pick ME!!!  

I see it's time for me to get myself in gear and fix both of my mistakes. I always say that I love to learn by making mistakes, and I do, but I really don't like it when the mistake costs me a lot of time because I don't have a lot of free time these days. Although I was feeling pretty good about the time and thinking that things were almost up to date and I could relax a wee bit. Maybe my lesson should be - never let your guard down!  But I'm going to find the bottom of that technology issue - that's disturbing as it's happened more times than I care to think about. The long arm one was totally me, and now I know never to set the pattern to greater than 18" since that's the maximum throat space on my longarm! Duh -- I can't believe that I ignored that number. 

There's going to more show and tell this week and more stuff about classes and upcoming clubs, so watch for that. 

Have a super day! And if you make a mistake, well - let's hope it doesn't cost you time like mine did. 

Ciao!!!!