Partially due to interest in possibly picking up sewing and incorporating fabrics in designs as well as partially due to stress and busyness at this point in the semester, I chose to do embroidery this week. I went into the CBA lab to see the demos of embroidery and got to see the Brother proprietary software as well as Inkstitch both on the machine (thank yous to both Tom and Cassia!). It was pretty darn cool to see examples which people had created in the past, and I was excited to see my own design actuated on fabric.
After a bit of thinking, I decided to make a Christmas present for my sister (it seemed like a lot of people doing embroidery in this week were making Christmas presents!). Since the class provided handkerchiefs, I decided to embroider something personal and gift one of those. I played around with some designs, trying to go for some cuter cartoony aesthetics, and after awhile even changed my mind about the subject of the artwork being about my sister herself (it's very hard to summarize my person) and decided instead to create some cute illustrations of Shakespearean characters in Inkscape and then use Inkstitch.
I came into the lab to embroider and for some reason assumed it would only take a couple hours (this is what I keep expecting every week for some reason). At first, it was really weird to see that the colors on the Brother machine didn't match my original design's colors. Tom didn't have an explaination for it either, but when I exported the file to a PES file this second time rather than my original export to DST file, the colors matched better on the machine (thank goodness I didn't have to guess).
I started with a little draft on canvas, and since that worked well, I moved on to the handkerchief, using a couple layers of [I forget the term but supportive material].