Chicken Scratch Embroidery

Nothing to do with the ScanNCut at all today. I am however feeling an enormous sense of achievement. I have today finished making an embroidered 3" square lavender bag. Not too exciting true, however it is the FIRST embroidery 'thing' I have actually made and finished since I got unwell in 2013. And back in 2013 -2015 I used to look at the 'things' I used to make and couldn't believe it was made by me nor that I would ever be able to do such things again. So an enormous milestone!

And here it is in all it's slightly dishevelled glory! it's two sided with slightly different stitching on each side, mostly because I didn't plan it very well. oops.

Side One

Side Two

A small thing but mine own!

SNC Basics - A step by step guide to Test Cuts

Draft post - quick and dirty for an fb group where a poor user has cut a ginormous hole in their mat (hopefully now taped up from the back and useable again).

Oh dear! you've cut a big hole in your mat, or your cuts aren't clean and messing up the surface of your material. arghhhh you are so frustrated, the machine looked so easy on the TV! and you can't get it to work and want to throw it out of the window for all the wasted time and money.
Is it your fault? why won't it work?

Well, have you done proper test cuts, do you understand the relationship between speed, blade depth and pressure? Because yes, some materials are just horrible and won't cut well, but usually cutting problems can be solved by using the right settings. The settings are NOT arbitrary, it's NOT an arcane mystery. The settings are logical and can be created to be pretty much exactly right if you know how and why they behave how they do.

I did a post on test cuts ages ago. This is complimentary to that and is a step by step 'how to do test cuts' the long way round.
Let's learn to do test cuts!

Designing from Scratch - Stage 2 - Deciding what stitches I want to use for my mobile phone sleeve

Morning. Yesterday I was outside actually embroidering the phone case (I'm a bit behind on blogging about this project) and now all my muscles hurt, I really need to find a way to support my body whilst embroidering, so today, I'm catching up on the project blogging as I can do this from bed.

This post is about me making my Chain Stitch Samples to work out what sort of stitches I might want to use to create the Paisley motifs on the phone sleeve.

6 inch square stitch sampler

SNC Basics - Exploring using the Machine as an X-Acto Knife or Guillotine Part One

As you may be aware I have severe ME/CFS which leaves me pretty much housebound and mostly bedbound. What this illness does, is stops my body providing me with the energy and strength that normal healthy people have, as well as giving me a lot of pain and nausea and other symptoms that are exacerbated when I do too much. And for me, doing too much is basically anything over and above eating, going to the loo and telling my carers what to do every day. And that's why I bought this Scan and Cut Machine, because I wanted to try and get back to doing some crafting using modern technology to reduce the amount of energy and movement needed.

This Month's CnC Member Gift (In the Garden Kit by HunkyDory Crafts)  HERE

SNC Basics - Tracing a computer image into Canvas - jpeg/jpg, gif, png, bmp - bitmap files

DRAFT POST _ SUBJECT TO REVISION

Evening agan. So yesterday's blog was about the different file types and their characteristics and finding out why some files are traced using the Trace Icon function and some are just imported using the SVG Import icon in Canvas. You can read it HERE

I'm also just at the beginning of a personal project to make a hand embroidered sleeve cover for my smart phone. And I'm going to be using Canvas and the ScanNCut to do as much of it as I can. I have no idea how much that will be as I've not consciously taken this approach before. I blogged about how I was starting this from scratch, working out my design constraints and finding a suitable pattern online HERE

Pattern from Cliparts.co that I shall be using in this post to take into Canvas