Happy Cinco de Mayo

I missed posting on Monday. We've just been engulfed (no pun intended) with news of the oil spill, cleaning up beaches, and taking care of anything we can pre-landfall. Then there are all of the issues about BP. We started out questioning the integrity of BP to handle the cleanup. Yes, we are skeptical. We've been through Hurricane Ivan and know how underhanded big business can be. We'll see what happens.

Back to embroidery. With all of the concern over the oil spill, and knowing that I need to practice digitizing, I created the Black Tide 2010 design.

As you know, I'm just learning digitizing. I digitized the pelican from a photograph that we had taken from the local Wildlife Sanctuary. Not very life like, but I was pleased that it turned out this well. I put the design on Facebook and only had one response from a lady who did not like it. I asked why but never received a reply. I don't know if she didn't like the digitizing, the theme, or what. If the design brought sad emotions and that's why she didn't like it. That is a good thing. It means that the artwork pulled those emotions. If she felt the design was simply ugly and not a good design, that is a totally different thing and I would need to go back to the drawing board and learn more on art and digitizing.

We were contacted by a gentleman who is a barber and wants his name on the front of his smock and a design on the back. He wanted the design to be electric clippers and a pair of scissors and sent photographs of what he wanted. I spent most of Monday going through stock designs putting together the design for him. He didn't like it. He said it looked too cartoonish and again sent the pictures. We have no stock designs for what he wanted, so I digitized it. He loved it. He's going to purchase a new smock and bring it to me for the embroidery.

Last week we had an order for a set of pillowcases. The hem on the pillowcases is 3" and the customer requested an "L" in the English font, 3" high. She had to settle on 2.5" because 3" on the hem would have gone off the bottom and looked bad. Sure. Ask me how I know. Because we did one and ended up scrapping it. Nevertheless, the pillowcases turned out lovely.

All of that compost and fertilizer that we put in the garden really paid off. The garden is the prettiest one since we've been gardening. It's so lush.

I love playing in the garden!