Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Valuable lessons!

I would love to post more photos, but I think my cord has a short and it's taking way too much time to download photos from my camera. In spite of that, here's my progress! Now that the dove is done, I'm feeling better about this piece. I took everyone's advice to clean up the white area. The most interesting thing happened when I looked at the dove under a magnifying glass - sure enough, not visible to the naked eye - cat hairs and lint. My tweezers looked HUGE under the magnifying glass. I did the best I could to extract the offending hairs and lint and it did improve the white immensely. Thanks for the suggestions! I am now religious about putting my piece in it's plastic bag the minute I'm finished with it.
I also learned a valuable lesson about ripping out red thread which leaves a residue. I had been frogging by putting my needle under each stitch and pulling the thread out and went from stitch to stitch. Of course there was nasty red fuzz left behind. Then I figured out if I pull the thread from the top, then turn it over and pull the next half of the stitch from the bottom, there wasn't as much lint! There seems to be much less tug on the thread that way. It's more time consuming, but it's worth it to not have that much red lint on the front of my piece. So, after all these years, I've figured out a great hint!

I have been taping my thumb joint to support it while I'm stitching and that is making a big difference. I'm not feeling the pain afterward. I had to tape my joint years ago and when I remembered to do it again, it was like a miracle. I know there are gloves you can wear, but I've found them to flimsy to be any benefit. I'll have to show you my taping! I'm like an Olympic athlete with all that tape!!

Last week I couldn't sleep through the LEMONADE! TWENTY FIVE CENTS! and today I awoke to huge sawing noises - much louder than your DIY sawing. I look out the window after I gave up on trying to sleep through it and found they were removing my neighbor's tree which is only a few feet away from my window! Life! The upside is I won't have to be raking all the fall leaves from this tree, so it's a good trade off.

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3 comments:

Daffycat said...

Yay! I'm glad the white looks better after a de-linting.

Ooo, tree trimming? Just wait, the neighbors will get a new yappy dog next! Sigh, you poor thing! Have you tried those huge foam ear plugs?

Ginnie said...

Glad you managed to get your dove whiter!! I must remember to do that myself.

staci said...

Very nice WIP...I always use a bit of tape to get the fuzzies off ;) Amazing all the tricks people have up their sleeves ;)