It's been one of those days....just about nothing has gone right, or the way it should go...and I had high hopes. I knew I'd be interrupted for a little bit--had to take a plant and a card over to my neighbor (a woman who was part of our bazaar group, not to be confused with bizarre group, which we sometimes can be, but she'd had an illness and we had a group-signed card, and since I lived the closest, I was taking it over, etc, etc)...anyway, where was I? Oh yeah--I knew I'd have at least one interruption, but not 5 bazillion....all from the same machine, no less.
Two days ago, the Diamond was merrily plugging along, spewing out designs for bags for the Emmy's--did I tell you we're going to have our bags & bracelets in gift bags at the Emmy's? We are, and we're so excited! But more about that in a later post....for now, anyway--I'm trying to crank out a few dozen designs for bags (we need to fill 40 gift bags for the show, with up to 2 items in each bag--yea! Such possibilities!!), and the deadline is tight--we have to have everything READY TO GO by the end of August, and no later than September 10th....
But meanwhile, the Diamond (my wonderful embroidery machine) is going full speed two days ago...and so today, I go downstairs expecting to load her up and get another couple of bags done, or at least one done before I go over to my neighbor's. But at least ONCE every five minutes, I get a message "Check needle," which means the needle has come unthreaded. If this happened just once--okay. No big deal. But it keeps happening...over and over. I change needles. I change the bobbin. I mean, I'm embroidering on silk with metallic thread, so I figure maybe it's a little temperamental, but this is getting ridiculous. Unless I actually SIT in front of her, she won't embroider more than 5 minutes. She needs attention? Really? It's a machine, not a person, I keep reminding myself...but I've come to believe that these machines sometimes act like a person. For reasons I can't explain, the stupid machine (I can say that since I'm upstairs and it can't hear me) actually does perform better when you sit right in front of it. Go figure.
But since I'm not about to do that all day, I try to figure out what the hell is wrong with her. In between trying to diagnose her problems, I'm also trying to assemble a couple of bags that I finished yesterday, which means adding their chains, and gluing them into their frames--a messy job that I'm not particularly fond of, especially the second side. Why the 2nd side? You can easily see what you're doing on the first side, but when it gets to the 2nd side, you have all the fabric from the 1st side in your way, and no matter how you twist and turn the bag, no matter what light you point it at, you're half-gluing in the dark, a little bit. It always makes me nervous, and once or twice, I've managed to drip glue out of the frame and half-way down the table before I realized what I was doing. Then you're supposed to wait 5 minutes for the glue to "set up" before you try to put the bag into the frame (one lady suggested going to make "a nice spot of tea" while waiting for the glue to set up--I guess she was British or something...). In the middle of all this, I had decided the Diamond's embroidery arm needed a bit of help, so I was "helping" it by stacking a box and a couple of books under the sections that extended way beyond the machine--my thought was that there might be too much hoop hanging beyond the machine, causing too much tension, which was causing all this "check needle" nonsense, so if I "lifted" the hoop a bit, I might be able to relieve some of that tension (headache) it was giving the machine (and me).
Problem was, when it shifted from one end of the hoop to the other to do more embroidery, while I was busy gluing, it knocked the box and the books off the table, scaring me, the dog and the cat--and causing me to drop the bag, the glue, and everything else I had in my hands (thank god I didn't have any glass of water in my hands right then). We all jumped about 3 feet and said holy crap! (Well, the cat didn't say anything, just me and the dog--he has a pretty good vocabulary.) And of course, within 2 minutes, I got the freakin' "check needle" message again.
I finally--FINALLY--got the stinking design done...one that should have taken 2 hours took the whole damned day, visit to the neighbor included. All that hoop-de-ra didn't really help either--the design is slightly off, so now I have to "embellish" it a bit to cover up the doo-das (my word for goofs), or I won't be able to use it at all...
After all of that I finally decided to just give up, go upstairs, and start drinking--my solution to the day's problems. So that's where I am now. Posting and drinking. A pretty good way to close out the day, I think.
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