July 2008 - Posts

• . . . and a good time was had by all!

  I’m not going to dwell on the fabulous lunch that we Central Florida machine embroiderers enjoyed a week and a half ago. Well, I MAY dwell on it, because it WAS fabulous. First of all, there were 24 of us, including four husbands, two of whom are into machine embroidery. You can find lots of pictures here. There were SO many projects. We’re such a talented bunch! We decided we need to do this again soon and we really do need a sleep-over in order to get better acquainted and have more time to share projects and expertise. One of the items on our agenda, choosing a charity project, we never did get to, so we’re discussing it in the forum and will choose sometime definite soon. If any of you have any suggestions, we’d be glad to hear them. Although all of us embroider, only some of us sew, so that will be a consideration. How’s this for a conversation (pre-luncheon)? CFME #1: I went to Florida State/ CFME #2: So did I. I was in the School of Education and I graduated in 1965. CFME #1: I was in the School of Education, too, and I graduated in 1965! CFME #2: Well, I lived in Florida Hall. CFME #1: So did I! I lived on the 6th floor. CFME #2: I lived on the 6th floor, too! CFME #1: Wow! I can’t wait until our luncheon. I’ll bet we recognize each other! Well, we didn’t recognize each other, but it was still a pretty spectacular coincidence and we did have lots of fun reminiscing about curfews and dress codes and lots of other things that the current residents of Florida Hall have never even heard of! Were those the “good old days?” You betcha! I hope you’re all now inspired, both for projects and to get your local machine embroidering buddies together! Now I lay me I received several comments about the sampler my mother embroidered while she was waiting for the birth of my brother. Some asked that the verse be digitized, but I think this is something you all can do for yourselves. The original sampler is about 20" x 30", not something we could do on our machines, but the text is certainly easy enough. The text on the sampler is in cross stitch, but ny text that you have in Alphabet XPress, your machines or your digitizing software will do the trick for you. I'm not particularly fond of the "If I should die before I wake" part. I think it's a little scary for little ones. So I Googled the first line and came up with this. Lots of interesting information about the little prayer, as well as some not so scary alternatives for the text. I'm partial to this one: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, Guard me while I sleep tonight, And wake me safe at dawn's first light. Goody New-shoes I know we've all heard the term "goody two-shoes" and some of us have even used it. The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes is a children's story by an anonymous author, published in 1765. The story is the origin of the popular phrase "goody two-shoes," often used to describe an excessively or annoyingly virtuous person. In more recent years, the phrase has developed a more negative connotation, implying that the virtuousness of a "goody two-shoes" is insincere. In any case, this is a different story about two new shoes. We never know what little thing we do will have a great impact. While I was in Kentucky we, DD, DSIL, DGS and I, drove into Indiana to an outlet mall. I managed to collect airline miles in several stores. It was a tough job but, hey, Bill and I like to travel and someone has to collect the miles. By the end of the day Reed was getting cranky, and justifiably so, hungry and tired as he was. Our last stop was at the Stride-Rite outlet store. Jen and Steve were looking at new sneaks for Reed and Reed was whining that he didn't WANT new shoes. Eventually, however, he did spot a pair that he liked. His parents were going to get a different, less expensive pair. In proud grandma fashion I took the shoes that Reed preferred, saying, "Oh, let me get him the pair he wants," and marched them to the register. When we got home, Reed took the shoes out of the box and found that he could put them on all by himself. He took them off and put them on and walked around preening. Jen said that she wouldn't be surprised if he took them to bed with him. I told her that I once knew a little girl who slept with her first pair of patent leather Mary Janes. Reed asked everyone he saw, “Do you want to see me put on my shoes all by myself?” and they all did. I don’t know if he slept with them, but those shoes were definitely the hit of my visit. As you can see, they’re wonderfully splendid shoes. For a wonderfully splendid boy. Got letters? I love digitizing alphabet letters, but I know that individual alphabet letters can be difficult to work with. Here are a few tips that I include with my Alphabets in our online store: When you have a set of alphabet letters that you use frequently to spell out words or phrases, take the time to set up a “design” that includes ALL the letters, numbers and punctuation from that set by importing them one at a time. (Fig 1a) It takes fewer than 5 minutes. If the letters in a set are large, you may have to set up separate files for the capitals and lower case letters. Don’t worry about having the letters overlap each other, as long as you can see them, or overlapping the edges of the hoop. Save this file, even though you may receive an error message telling you that you will not be able to stitch the design. After all, you have no intention of stitching the design!  Some digitizing and editing programs lock all the objects together when you save a design. This tip won’t work with those programs. The next time you want to use some of those letters start a new file, and reduce the view to 50%.  Then import the file you had previously saved and immediately move it over to the side. From there it’s a simple matter to drag the letters you want to use, duplicating as necessary, into the hoop and then delete the ones you won’t be using this time. Another minute or two to align the letters and you’re nearly finished.  The last step is to correct the stitching order so that the letters stitch from left to right. If the letters have small jumps between them that may be difficult to clip, assign different colors to the odd and even numbered letters, forcing the machine to stop and cut the thread after each letter. (This trick works with keyboard lettering, too.) Letters, even in the same set, are of varying sizes. If you change the size of the letters, increase or decrease by a percentage rather than to a size.  This will insure that your letters maintain the same aspect ratio. Different letters stitch out in different ways. For example a letter “l” will increase at both ends while being stitched while a letter “o” will draw up.  When you’re aligning letters, align to the middle rather than to the bottom or top. If you’re setting up a phrase of more than one line of text, have the second line stitch from right to left, the third line from left to right and so on.  This will avoid that long jump thread between rows.  A long jump thread can catch the foot of your machine and throw the design out of registration or become buried in the next row of stitches and be difficult or impossible to trim neatly Help me out here . . . please Believe it or not, sometimes I'm speechless. I love writing my blog, but sometimes I just don't know what to say. You can help me out by telling me what kinds of things you want me to write about. Once you get me started, I'm sure I can fill pages and pages! Well, I'm off to greet August. How did it get here so fast? TTYL, Ann Posted Jul 31 2008, 10:46 AM by AnnTheGran with 11 comment(s) Filed under: alphabets, luncheon. Central Florida, lettering, florida luncheon, sampler

• Time flies, whether you're having fun or not.

  Time flies, doesn't it? First I had a house full of kids. Then I had a car full of kids. Then my nephew in Tallahassee had a boat full of kids. Then I had a car full of kids again. Then I had no kids. Then I got on an airplane and spent 4 days in Kentucky with my youngest grandson, 3 1/2, who said to me on Tuesday, "I had fun pwayinging wiss you graymaw!" Yes, I leaked tears all the way home. It's very quiet around here now. Very quiet. Very, very quiet. As soon as I get a chance I'll scrap up some pictures of both visits and give you the links. The Embroidery on the left was stitched by my mother before my older brother was born. It has hung over the cribs and beds of my siblings and me, of both of my children and of all 6 of my grandchildren. In 1940 it hung over a tan crib with bunny decals. In 2008 it's hanging over a Lightning McQueen race car toddler bed. Time flies . . . Speaking of time flying . . . In July, 1997 a motley group of machine embroiderers from all over the continent got together for a couple of days in Paducah, Kentucky. We didn't have an agenda, but we did have a terrific time. Now, 11 years later a motley group of machine embroiderers, nearly the same number, but all from Central Florida, are getting together for a luncheon in just a couple of days. We have no agenda and I know we're going to have a terrific time. There will be lots of photos, I know, and I'll get as many of them posted, or scrapped and posted, as quickly as possible. I hope the photos will encourage other local groups to get together. And while we're on the subject, on July 20, 1943, a baby girl was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania. On July 20, 2008 she'll be celebrating her "Medicare birthday." That would be me and that would be time REALLY flying! Am I retired yet? No? Thought not . . . We WERE speaking of grandchildren, right? There are two features of Catalog XPress that have been very helpful for me and my oldest granddaughter. Sabrina was 9 or 10 when she began using my Brother PE-200 small hoop, stand alone embroidery machine. At that age Sabrina had the attention span of a gnat. I wanted her to finish any project she started, so I used the Search feature to limit her design choices. I limited the number of stitches in the designs to 900 and the colors to 4. I entered the dimensions of her hoop. Once I clicked on OK, and gave Catalog XPress a few moments to examine every design, the only designs that appeared on the pages were those with 900 or fewer stitches, 4 or fewer colors and all would fit in her small hoop. Since she never saw designs that might take more than an hour to stitch or have lots of thread changes or that were too large for her hoop there wasn't any whining or begging. She chose the design she wanted to stitch wrote it to her card and got busy. And Always completed her project. I'd like to thank all of you who, in response to my last blog, let me know that their grandchildren live around the corner. For those who commiserated with me about grandchildren scattered far away, here's something I used to do a lot and sometimes still do. The printing function of Catalog XPress has several options. In the "Print Catalog" option there's a box you can check telling the program to print only the selected designs. You can also choose how many designs in each row and each column. I select 4 designs and print that page. Then I address an envelope to myself and put a stamp on it. I put both the printed designs, a note asking the grandchild to select a design and the SASE (Stamped Self Addressed Envelope, remember?) in another envelope and send it to one of my grandchildren. In a few days I will receive the design page with one of the designs circled and, frequently, a note or a picture on the back. You have to include the SASE or you might not see the design selection until 6 months have gone by and both you and your grandchild have forgotten all about it. In these days of email, and cell phones, we grandmas with distant grandchildren don't get anything to hang on our refrigerators and this helps fill up the space. Oh, yes, remember to get right on that project and send your grandchild the finished item ASAP. And now for something completely different. I LOVE Nutella. Not the Nutella we get over here. That Nutella is very stiff and has a strong hazelnut flavor. I imagine that's the way the Nutella people think we Americans like our Nutella. I love the Nutella in Europe. It's runny and sweet and chocolat-y. You know the little packs of cheese spread with cracker sticks we get over here? Well, in Italy they have little packs of Nutella with cookie sticks. I love Nutella so much that our Dutch friends laughed at me. A LOT! And took pictures of me holding, spreading and eating Nutella. What you see on the right is my typical Dutch breakfast, wheat bread spread with peanut butter, sprinkled with chocolate and topped with sliced banana. Gotta love the Dutch for eating chocolate for breakfast. But not, apparently with peanut butter and bananas, since they found it so amusing that Theo had to take a picture. He also felt he need to take a picture of me spreading Nutella on the left over half banana. I ran out of European Nutella a long time ago. When we were going to meet Loes and Theo in Toronto, I asked Loes to bring me some Nutella.  She was afraid she wouldn't be able to get through customs with it because it's food. (Ambrosia is more like it!) Imagine my delight when I ran into European Nutella in an Italian deli in La Grange, Kentucky last week. Of course I bought a jar. I would have bought several, but I wanted to leave some for the other Americans who are starved for European Nutella. To come home I wrapped the jar in plastic and put it in the new leather travel kit I had bought for Bill, along with a little cardinal shaped box and a package of socks. When I got home and went to unlock my suitcase I noticed that 2 of the numbers on the lock were in the correct position. Didn't think much of that. Then, when I took the travel kit out I saw that it was unzipped. Got me wondering, but still didn't think much of it. Upon opening the travel kit I found the TSA note saying that my suitcase had been inspected. Did they see the Nutella on the x-ray machine and think I was carrying plastic explosive? They didn't unzip my travel kit or my make-up bag so I'm sure it was the jar of Nutella that set off the alarm. That tickled me. Oh, for those coming to the CF luncheon on Saturday, I'm not bringing my jar of Nutella, so forget about it! Reality Bytes. My first choice, Stephanie, won Top Chef. My first choice, Christina, won Hell's Kitchen. In two weeks we'll find out if the gals go 3 for 3 this season during the final challenge on The Next Food Network Star. It's Lisa vs. 2 men. She's the best looking and the best cook, but not the best TV personality, so it's iffy. My fingers are crossed. TTFN. I'll see some of you on Saturday, Ann         Posted Jul 16 2008, 03:47 AM by AnnTheGran with 11 comment(s) Filed under: catalog xpress, grandchildren, nutella, print your design catalog

• Grandchildren, gotta love 'em!

  Here it is July already. Where in the world has the year gone? One place it went was lickedy split right by me and until today I hadn't seen any of my grandchildren since Christmas, two of them since before Christmas. But today was delicious. DD's 3 oldest are in Florida for the month with their father and he dropped them here today. Tomorrow we're taking off for Tallahassee with the 3 of them to celebrate the 4th on my sister's boat and to visit my mother who lives in an assisted living residence close to my sister. Later my son's two were dropped off my their mother and my son joined us for pizza festivities in the evening before taking his to home. After they had left I looked at Bill and said "They didn't use to take up so much space!" He replied, "We're blessed, arent't we?" Oh, yes indeed. Those of you who have been with me from the beginning will remember my daughter's twins. They were born at the same time as AnnTheGran's Design exchange. I've taken care of the first 5 grands from the time they were born until the time they started "real" school. When the twins were born I was caring for my son's two and my daughter's little boy. Because Jen was home on maternity leave I had only two to care for and had the time to get that first little page online. When the girls arrived for their first day in Grandma's Day Care their oldest cousin had begun pre-K at an all day charter school, so I had only the four. (Only!) And so it went, as the years flew by and the older children left for "real" school until I was left with only the twins. And then, in 2001, the unthinkable! My daughter and her family moved to Kentucky, a day and a half's drive away. She compounded the audacity by having another baby. In another state. Sixteen hours away. And sent him to day care. (DD is a middle school teacher.) The upshot of this is that, although today was deleriously joyful (and long and tiring!) I still have one grandchild I haven't seen since Christmas. So, on Thursday I'm leaving on a jet plane to spend a few days with him, and DD and DSIL, of course. Grandmas's should NOT have to go 6 months without hugging their grandchildren. That's just wrong. As you an imagine, machine embroidery has not been forefront in my mind the past few days. I don't want to leave you in the lurch without an embroidery fix, so I've uploaded the printable PDF file for a little project that I created a while back. You can download the design files and the instructions here. I hope you have some fun with it and it gives you some ideas for free standing embroidery projects of your own. To answer JanMcKinstry's question, "What is a pocket full of loonies and toonies?" Loonie is the nickname for the Canadian $1 coin. I'm sure that nickname came about because there's a picture of a loon on the back of the coin. Toonie is the nickname for the Canadian $2 coin, I guess because it's two dollars and the word rhymes with loonie.   mattersoftheart comments, in reply to my blog about the way I, personally, hoop towels, that she's tried everything and can's seem to get the towel to soften up. It really does take a warm scrub in the washing machine to wash and rinse it all out. Sometimes more than one wash. Don't use a heavy wash away, like Romeo which is more for lace and other free standing projects,but a light weight topping. Let me know how you fare.   I'm going to hit the sack. We have a long day tomorrow, haven't even begun to think about packing. Y'all have a safe and happy-end. TTYL, Ann    Posted Jul 04 2008, 12:28 AM by AnnTheGran with 23 comment(s) Filed under: light weight topping, hooping towels, annthegran stabilizer, star button project, grandchildren