Anita Goodesign 2015 party!

My goal for 2015 was to complete at least one project every month. I started out with several, but abandoned them halfway mostly due to a lack of vision. Setbacks happened when I misaligned designs even with the help of the sophisticated InnovEye technology of my machine. I took a deep breath and tried not to look back at all the failures.

Then, inspiration struck once again when I was invited to attend the Anita Goodesign conference. Last year I had attended a similar conference for Jenny Haskins and was asking around about how to successfully embroider on flimsy materials like scarves. Different people had different suggestions, but the zest of all was to stabilize heavily. The scarf I chose was a 100% viscose material.  I had been drooling over Sadia’s ‘Jacobean Symphony’ design for years and it was finally in my possession!

A close up

I had scraps of water soluble stabilizer that I was reluctant to throw away. So, I created a concoction of water and water soluble stabilizer in a spray bottle. This is not my original idea. I had read about this in the Martha Pullen’s embroidery forum a while back. Spray heavily on the area to be stitched, let it dry and finally iron out the creases. I decided to use a tear away for the backing. I combined two designs and increased the size (along with the stiches) to fit my biggest hoop on the Singer XL6000.

The design stitched out beautifully. I did not try to match the back with the same colors. Most of the backing washed out after hand washing. Now I was ready for the party! 

During the two days we finished 7 projects of different skill level from Anita's Playhouse collection.

Adorable pocket holder in embroidery hoop.

Here is the front and back of the Raccoon in the hoop purse.

Of all the projects the hooped mouse pocket and the raccoon bag were the most adorable. The raccoon bag left our team of three exhausted. Going back and forth on a big size hoop with layers of material on the top and bottom was simply unmanageable. The blue tapes did not do their job of holding the fabric and the back of the hoop and kept falling off. We could not agree that this in the hoop technique was supposed to make one’s life easy! And on top of that the machine picked up on our nervousness and started breaking threads, refused to thread the needle and created thread nests! 

Samplers with different techniques

This will be Simmi's gift!

And this was my favorite one!

Some more!

As you can see I took lots of pictures of the display of their stitch outs.  The designs were beautiful, but I was expecting to see more of real projects, like applications of the designs, as was in the Jenny Haskins conference.

Idea for my FabMo stash

 All in all it was a fun filled weekend. I was happy to be a part of it.