Yesterday, I machine embroidered the design you see below. My daughter chose this design. I wanted to add brighter colors, but my daughter requested that I use muted “earthy” colors. This is my interpretation.
This machine embroidered design was 44,845 stitches, it took almost three hours to create. The good news is my daughter really loves how this turned out (and so do I). Of course I’ll be making this design again; however, I will be using more bold colors.This is not my design. I ordered it from Urban Threads. If I’d designed this, the process would have take much longer than three hours.
This is going to be bag… a lunch bag if you want to be specific. Of course, this bag will have a liner. All my bags do (and that includes what I knit or crochet). After all, liner adds stability. This should be complete by Wednesday. You wan to know something? This would have already been completed, if I had not decided to embroider another design onto this project.
The installation was flawless. Check out the queen and her entourage! Honeybee queens live about two to four years. During the warmer months, the worker bees live about six weeks. Do you know something interesting? The worker honeybees don’t sleep. They literally work themselves to death. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve always been fascinated by a variety of things found in nature, including insects. As a child, I would watch ants and honeybees for hours. They impressed me because they were constantly working.
Shaking the honeybees into their new home
If you were to stop by, and I was near the beehives, I would not be wearing a bee suit. I’m right up at the hive. The honeybees buzz about me, some have bumped into me but they continue on about their bee activities. I’ve not been stung yet; however, during a new hive installation I ALWAYS take the precautionary measures and suit up. I’m not taking any chances. I did observe (while shaking the honeybees into the hive) that their temperament was calm so I know I’ll be able to walk up to them without a bee suit. I like that!
When it’s warm, you’ll find me around them a lot. I enjoy watching them flying to and from the hive. The gatherer bees are greeted at the entrance by the guard bees, who check to see if they actually belong to the hive. Once they’ve been given the approval they enter the hive and continue about their duties. If they’ve collected nectar, this will be passed off to another honeybee by regurgitating the liquid into another bees mouth.
Yesterday, throughout the day, I made a point to go back and check on the honeybees to see how they were doing. All seems to be fine. I love beekeeping!
Early this morning, I walked back to check on them again and they appear to be settling into their new home. Just like the other package honeybees these are very calm. I was able to walk amongst them without an issue. Later today, my daughter and I will go out there and hang out with them a bit. I’ll be sure to bring my Native American Flute in the key of G.
Throughout the day, I popped by to check on them and I must say that they seem to be settling into their home quite nicely. This afternoon, we had rain showers for a few hours which made most of the honeybees go inside their new home. There were a few stragglers that refused to go inside though. It wasn’t a hard rain. After the rain had stopped, I noticed some of the honeybees doing widening circles as they oriented themselves to their new location and later some ventured out to find nectar sources. 🙂
I’m really enjoying the addition of the Big Berkey in our home. It makes the simple act of drinking water so much easier. Earlier I was using a tiny filtered pitcher and the occasional bottled water, but now I just fill up at the Big Berkey.
Our Big Berkey Filtration System is placed on the center island in our kitchen and I must say it is receiving a lot of attention from my daughter and myself. Not only do I use the water to drink, I also use it during cooking. The Big Berkey holds 2.5 gallons of water. I fill it three times daily and while I could have purchased a larger Berkey (even though the Big Berkey is suitable for four people) this is the most convenient. Standing at about 19″ tall, it’s a nice size and I didn’t want something even taller crowding our counter space.
Initial impression
The water filtered through the Big Berkey tastes great. Installed correctly, I’m not experiencing any weird taste in the water. Initially, I did not install it correctly and the water tasted like tap water. Why was this happening? The rubber washers had not been installed on the black filters and so tap water was dripping into the filtered water area. That was easily remedied by installed the washers onto the black filters. Problem solved! Now our water has no after taste and none of that chemically taste that I could always detect in tap water. Also, the water didn’t have the “plastic” taste that I could spot in bottled water. Regardless of the brand, if the water is in a plastic bottles I could taste the plastic.
Loving the Big Berkey!
It’s safe to say that I’m loving the Big Berkey, the initial cost might make some pause. I spent $286 for the unit that also has cylinders to remove fluoride. But, if you purchase bottled water, it won’t be long before the Big Berkey pays for itself. Before the Berkey, I only carried freshly made juices to work and that was due to the fact that I hated how bottled water tasted, but thanks to the Big Berkey I’m now bringing water to work in my stainless steel water bottles.
Let me say upfront that I ONLY merged different bits of other embroidery designs (created by other designers) to come up with my own. I want to get a feel for machine embroidery from already created designs before I put the time into turning my own drawings into “embroidered masterpieces.”
This merged embroidered design had a lot of errors
What’s wrong with this embroidered design?
I purposely choose the embroidered files to create my own recreated merged design because of some of the comments that were made about the separate embroidered designs. They weren’t all positive.
My first impression, while watching this was being machine embroidered was…
The people who created the original embroidered designs were (hopefully) still in the learning stage. I would not be pleased to pay for something like this with the errors I’m seeing.
Perhaps they used a auto-stitch feature (some embroidery programs have that) in the embroidery program that they have. That could have explained some of the spotty stitching.
Why do I say that? Look at the above picture. There are several gaps. Those gaps should have been manually filled with embroidered stitches. Also, if you look there is a red sewn line running from the bottom lip up to the upper lip. That running stitch should have been hidden under the main stitching and connected to the upper lip at the side so it would not be noticeable. I didn’t even talk about the eyes, those errors might not be as noticeable, but those have issues also.
The only reason I know what is wrong with this merged embroidered design is because I’ve stitched out machine embroidery designs that were “perfect.” I purposely worked with already completed designs, because I wanted an understanding on how machine embroidery works, so I’ve mainly used created designs for the past several months. If you’re paying attention while the machine is embroidering, it’s easy to spot when something is done incorrectly.
Even with the mistakes, I still love the design I created from merging various embroidered designsOriginal merged embroidery file
I did clean up what I could by snipping away the threads that really stood out (with my embroidery scissors) but it still needs a lot of work. It could be fixed if repaired by hand embroidery, but I’m not doing that. I tend to keep “before projects” just so I can look back to see how I improved.
Now that this embroidery file is merged, it will be a great canvas to play around with as I apply some of the techniques I’ve learned with my machine embroidery program (Embird). The next step is to clean up this merged embroidery file and turn it into an embroidered pattern that will stitch out nicely. No, you won’t see an update tomorrow. There is still a lot to learn (after all) but I’m looking forward to stitching this out again and seeing how it’s improved.
Of course, now I’m just eager to learn as much as possible so I can start turning some of my sketches (and my talented daughters) into embroidered works of art.
World of Warcraft: Aggra
And I can’t forget my desire to turn a WoW character into an embroidered creation! I’m looking at you Aggra! Female orcs are my favorite in-game character. Although I haven’t played World of Warcraft in a while, the game still has a lot of great memories and I do keep in contact with a few folks through email and phone. I’m sure I’ll be touring that virtual world with some of my toons, someday…
Merged embroidery design that I made from a few embroidery files
I cut parts from a few embroidery files, added them together, merged and removed some things that I didn’t want on the eyes. Speaking of eyes, there was actually only one eye. I just made a mirror image to make the second eye. I saved everything into one machine embroidery file. For my first time, I don’t think I did too badly and what’s better is that I was able to create my own machine embroidered ‘face’. Well… the proof lies in the sewing an embroidered file. After all, a embroidered picture can look really nice, but that gives you no clue on how it will stitch out, unless they take an actual photo of the completed design (untouched).
Later today, I’ll hoop it and stitch it out with my Brother Designio Series DZ820E embroidery machine.
