Cajun Corner – Vol.
5, No. 21 – June 1, 2013
Bon
Jour! Welcome to Cajun
Stitchery’s weekly email and welcome to our family.
ΘΘΘΘΘ
Don’t forget to visit us at www.cajunstitchery.com, www.flickr.com/photos/cajunstitchery, and, www.cajunstitchery.etsy.com often. We are also on Twitter and Facebook.
Visit
our on-line catalogs at:
Last week I said Cajun Stitchery needs to get
some baby stuff in stock. Well, we now
have some onsies, thanks to a good friend.
Of course, we can always make our in-the-hoop baby bibs with a snap
closure and the monogram of your heart’s desire embroidered on it. These bibs can even be made with a plastic
liner for water proofing.
Oh, and don’t forget the clock faces that we can
embroider now. These clocks are quartz
clocks like you would get at Wal-Mart with an embroidered face. The clock face can have the baby’s name and
date of birth embroidered on it. It is
personalized and unusual and who doesn’t need a clock in the baby’s room.
A lesson was learned at Cajun Stitchery during
the past few weeks. You may recall early
on that we learned to use a product that is essentially a sheet of starch for
embroidering on high pile fabric. The
purpose of this product is to keep the stitches above the pile of fabrics like
terrycloth or velvet. Embroidery tends
to sink into the pile of these fabrics and can almost disappear on very thin
designs without something holding the stitches up and/or laying the pile
down. After the embroidery is done, warm
water removes the sheet of starch. I
have always had a problem removing the starch.
The only way I have ever been able to totally remove the starch is to
wash the item in the washer, although all of the articles that I’ve read say
that thoroughly rinsing with warm water does the trick.
A few weeks back I received an order for
embroidery on a velveteen cape that a lady was having made for her
granddaughter. I used the infamous
product to keep the embroidery higher than the pile of the velveteen. The embroidery turned out gorgeous. Sadly, the starch wouldn’t come out. Obviously, I could not launder the
velveteen. It took a couple of weeks of
lightly spraying the fabric and gently massaging the starch out to get the
starch mostly out. It still didn’t get
all of the starch out and I stopped working with it when it looked like the
fabric itself was starting to deteriorate.
The end result is that the
embroidery looks great but around the embroidery there is a milky, starchy
appearance. Of course, I told the
customer there would be no charge for this.
If she can launder it, the starch will come out and it will look great,
but I won’t launder velveteen.
We tried everything that our sweet embroidery
tech suggested, as well as anything George and I could think to do. We did lots of research on velveteen and how
to clean velveteen. The end result was
that I refuse to use this product again for this purpose. We had to devise a method of embroidery on
high pile items without using this product.
There are too many fluffy baby blankets, velvets, corduroys, and towels
to refuse these orders.
Over the past year we have done some incredible
embroidery and used many new techniques, including some that we had to create
ourselves in order to achieve the embroidery results we needed. We decided to digitize a mesh layer of
stitches under the embroidery for the purpose of holding down the pile. Then the design would be embroidered on top
of the mesh.
As it turned out we had an order for embroidery
on a very fluffy baby blanket. We tried
several designs on towels. The mesh
theory does not work on lettering. In
addition, too many layers of stitches and the embroidery is no longer pliable
and turns hard as a rock. Not good for a
sweet, fluffy, baby blanket. Since the
block design on the blanket had a satin stitch around it, we used a piece of
thin tear away stabilizer on top. We
tore the stabilizer off before the satin stitch edge was stitched and it turned
out great. The lettering problem was
resolved by placing a zigzag underlay and loosening the thread tension. It worked and turned out beautiful.
In addition to the above, we had an order for
monogramming towels this week. Using the
same method, the monogramming turned out perfect.
My only regret is that we did not figure out the
new technique before stitching on the velveteen cape. It was a lesson learned, albeit, the hard
way.
There are some new listings in the Etsy
Store. In case you do not know, if you
go to the Cajun Stitchery Facebook page, there is a button entitled
“Shop”. If you click the “Shop” button
you can see all of the items listed in our Etsy store. I actually tried to put a picture where the
“Shop” picture is located but so far it has not worked for me.
This afternoon George and I attended the Wooly Booger
Blow Away the Hurricanes Bawl at the beach.
Good friends, good food, good drinks and a good time was had by all who
attended.
Have a wonderful week.
If you are not a subscriber and
would like to receive Cajun Corner weekly, please email cajunstitchery@yahoo.com and let me
know to put you on our email list.
No time to read Cajun Corner? Visit our blog at www.cajunstitchery.blogspot.com
and click the Odiogo button to hear the computer read the blog.
Betcha didn’t know this…
June has the Summer Solstice, the day with the longest daylight
of the year, typically on June 21st, which is also National Nude day.
Peggy Henshall
Cajun Stitchery
(850) 261-2462
P.S. You are always welcome to stop by and look at
all of the catalogs and pass some time with me, cher.
No comments:
Post a Comment