For those of you that know me you know that I have two sides: the side of me that can hide away in the sewing room for days at a time working on a crafty little adventure and the other side that likes to put on her boots and leathers and have an adventure on the back of my 2009 Tri-Glide (formerly a 2001 LowRider). There aren't many opportunities for the two sides to converge, but I recently discovered a great design site (Urban Threads) that gave me the inspiration to make a little something for the bike adventures.
Total Cost: $50.00 vest, design, thread and stabilizer (obviously that doesn't include the trike!) Not bad since similarly priced vests run upwards of $200.Total Time: 4 hours (phew - that was a long stitchout) I wanted to take it very slow as I knew there wasn't any opportunity to yank stitches without leaving a noticeable boo boo.
What I Learned:
- Don't be afraid of leather - just take it easy and keep a watchful eye. At every change in sound in the machine I would stop the embroidery and check for nests, whether the bobbin needed filling, etc. It added lots of time but I am happy to report that there was not a single errant stitch
- I used a design that was just around 5x9" and had 77,000 stitches originally. I removed some of the color variations that overlayed the design to reduce density and am very happy that I did. I don't know that I could have added another thing on top of this design. As it was I broke 6 needles getting through all of the layers
- Spend lots of time getting the hooping exactly right as a design that isn't oriented properly will just look silly on the back of a garment
- I used 3 layers of stabilizer: 1 sticky, 1 medium weight cut away and then a fusible web that I could fuse to the lining (I couldn't remove the lining as I already had patches attached). I could have done with just two, but wanted to play it safe.
