Hodge podge of a week with some highlights
I completed nothing this week except creating and editing teaching videos to support my 3 hour Straight Line Ruler Work class.
Ruler work on a domestic is pretty difficult to show live. You kinda need 3 hands and it’s hard to not block the camera with your hands. Other teachers will not be surprised with this statistic: it took 10 hrs to tape and edit 7 videos with a total play time of 31 minutes. They will debut this Saturday at an online class and I suspect I will skip some of what I’ve recorded. One of the great things about editing my own videos is that I can double or triple time some of the stitching parts, compacting the time. I’m thankful that video taping and editing is a skill set I picked up out of necessity post lockdown.
I have long felt the need for some hand work to do while teaching online, traveling or, like last weekend, editing videos. Editing videos requires enormous patience. You will do a step and then the program must implement that step and it can take a loooooong time! BUT, if you step away, it will stop and ask you a question that must be answered before continuing. Ugh!
So, that wait, wait, wait thing really made me search for something to do during those times. I am a Knitting Failure. There is no good reason for my failure, I just don’t seem to get the gist of it. But I did crochet a lot as a kid, in college and as a young Mom. I recently came upon the IG account of tlyarncrafts.
I adore her! She is creative, supportive, is an excellent teacher and is not all “influencer”, just a fun person. She has some cool, easy patterns, so I sent off for the actual printed directions, yarn, etc to make this:
Isn’t that adorable? It looks doable and it also looks like it WON’T have that happy-hands-at-home look. I bought the kit just to keep it simple.
In the meantime, I wanted to play around and dust off my crochet skills so I did this:
Oh yeah, I can do this! I hope to get the kit by the weekend so that I can start on it.
I also have a new Grandson Project: postcards. Little Man is a car guy and I asked his Mom what his favs were. I had this vision of transferring an image onto a postcard; should be easy peasy, right? Well I have a laser printer and you need an inkjet image to transfer an image. Yeah, I tried the laser and almost ruined my printer in the process. Kinko’s does not have ink jet printers. Alright, Plan B.
I thought this might be an opportunity to play with some surface design; this would be a bite-sized project. I thought I would pull out my inks and try that. Psssssh. First step was to get the image onto the fabric. I won’t detail my false starts trying to do this on the printer again, using freezer paper. That was a no go.
I started with this image and posterized it in Photo Shop Elements.
For the next try I took out my Daylight light box and transferred this image on to fabric and got this far:
I realized it was going to be fairly herculean for ME to paint that and besides, Little Man delights in the details like the V-8 ornament, the mustang on the front grill, the vents on the side…. That was way too much detail.
My next try will be to take the paper image and use Odicoat to protect the paper image on the postcard. Odicoat is made for fabric, so that may not work either. If it does, that will make for an easy project!
NOTE: Please resist giving me ideas on this. I really want to stumble through this on my own. I am learning from each “failure”; that failed product or process might be useful in another project. So no matter what, I am learning from each try. I am so not a surface designer and I would like to up my skills. This playing will help me with that.
And NO, I do not have any interest in print-on-demand like Spoonflower, etc. I am doing a little postcard for heaven’s sake. It takes foreeeeeeever to get something printed on demand. By then Little Man may have a new passion. I am working towards something turnkey here at home, easy peasy. No. Print-on-demand.
And I took a little time to work on this too. I wrote about it here, here, and here.
I’m dying to have the time to start on that border! I used my Wave Edge ruler (no longer made) to mark my spine. I love that ruler. For marking spines I need a very gentle wave. Deeper waves are much harder to quilt. The Wave Edge has a 1/4 dip from the middle. I also need the ruler to be 24″ to be able to plan the layout of my border or spine. The Wave Edge is unique with its 1/4″ dip on a 24″ ruler.
I tried wool thread first. I loooove wool thread! But it did not cut it; it was way too subtle. I auditioned Aurifil 12 wt in red and blue; I’m leaning towards the red. I am hellbent on big fat 12 wt thread for no good reason other than I just want to.
And there we come to a grinding halt. There are contracts to review, sign and book, dinner to make, yada yada. One last thing, we had lighting put in our backyard and it is gorgeous:
It’s more subtle than the photo shows, just gives a nice glow.
I’ll be linking up:
Nina-Marie’s Off the Wall Friday
If you can’t find the ruler in a local B&M, you can still get such a ruler on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/HONEYSEW-Waves-Quilting-Templates-Sewing/dp/B09B8MVMXB
I love your fortitude an passion for learning new skills, Jenny!
Thank you for the comment Susan. That particular ruler is not what I need for spines, the dip is way too deep for a wave in a 5″ border. There are a lot of “dip” rulers, but not what I need. The dip in the wave edge is about 1/4″ from the center; any deeper and it’s difficult to quilt and alters the look pf the feather. What I look for is both very tiny dip (1/4″) and a 24″ length. I don’t see that out there.
Tried to order a Line Tamer this week and your site refused all credit cards. Does this mean you are out of stock or…?
Oh so sorry Sue. I heard there was a problem and got Woo Commerce to look at it. Orders have come through since then. Thank you so much for letting me know. Could you please try again? Thank you!
Video editing sounds like a wretched chore but I’m sure the effort you put into it makes for a great class experience for your virtual students. And I’m so impressed with your crochet project! Is that peachy pink yarn what you’ll use for your cardigan? That will be such a pretty color on you. Finally, which Bernina are you using to quilt with Aurifil 12 wt thread? I wish I could get those heavier weights in a bigger putup spool or cone for the long arm. I’ve been dying to try something like that but nervous about how fast I’d run out of thread and a million tie offs all over the quilt.
Video editing is not a lot of fun but it’s not hard, just hurry-up-and-wait kind of thing, which is challenging for me! I actually will crochet the sweater in green, I’ll post! I use a 765. They only make it in the medium spools. Oh I’d love to see what you do with it on a long arm!