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Ok,  pic of the first test:

(One of these days I will really learn to use one of my photo software packages so I can make pics like this the best they can be, but no time now.  So sorry that they are not perfect.  And yes, there are pieces of thread that I did not trim…it’s a test!!))

The youngest diva and I stood there and watched a lot of this stitch out.  You would think it was all magic the way we become so fascinated.  I would be lying if I said my attention to it is purely professional as I am just as excited watching the stitches take shape as my 8 yr-old is, but I do also learn a lot about the designs and things I need to fix by watching the machine do its thing.

If you look closely at the above pic, you can see some rippling, some shadows, and off-kilter lines.  Why?  Because I got lazy, and I still needed to adjust some stitch densities.  My laziness means I did not prep the fabric the way I would the actual dress pieces, so the fabric could not stand up to the stitches which caused a lot of rippling and nap diving (burrowing into the velvet) even though I still used a topper.  My bad…however, I think that may also have helped to make it very clear where I still needed to adjust stitch densities and satin stitch widths.

A bit closer here:

  This one gives a sense of how small this all is as you can see some microscopic dust (a decorating choice in this house), and the weave of the velvet!  You can also see how off center things got because I did not stabilize well enough.  You’d think I was a rookie…

So, I spent a few hours re-working the designs, checking and adjusting every line and shape…I dreamed all night long that the blue feathers on the eagle kept growing and changing and re-swirling different directions.  Do you think my embroidery dreams are evidence of psychosis??

My embroidery hubris made me take my next test a bit more seriously.  I interfaced the velvet first with a woven fusible then fused Decorbond to that.  After I hooped my sticky back, I then used a heavy duty tear away behind that…I contemplated using 2 layers of the tear away, but worried that might have been an overkill that would cause skipped stitches.

This test was much better all the way around.

There are still some shadows from the nap of the velvet, but no rippling or nap diving.  All of the braid lines stayed lined up though I still went back into the design files to make the satin stitch even just a bit wider to try to fill in the remaining gaps between the satin stitch columns and the back stitch outlines.

Here is the eagle that haunted my dreams:

The winged lion:

The gryphons and a braid:

The nessies:

Bodice front with the birds, serpent braid, and red braids…you can see clearly here that the satin stitch inside the braids needs to be wider…that just bugs me!

And lastly the vertical braids which also got a bit more tweaking after this:

I sent the test piece off to Colleen who will see the family that wants the reproduction at a feis this weekend…is it CNY?  Colleen called me when she got it this afternoon, and she was as excited as I am about this little thing!  So nice to hear her voice.  One of these days I hope I get to meet some of my fellow dressmakers in person…such great people!

ETA:  More curve on the learning curve!  We decided to use a gold metallic in place of the tan thread in the designs.  It was a particular kind of metallic from Madeira meant to be strong.  Yeah…so freaking strong that my machine would not cut it so this is what the stitch out looked like!

Yuck, boo, hiss!!!  No time to find a similar color in a different thread, so I went back in to re-do the embroidery sequence.  Thank goodness I consider this kind of challenge to be FUN!!

I wrote about the beginning of this journey here:  Newest Endeavor