{"id":26795,"date":"2013-06-23T21:15:52","date_gmt":"2013-06-24T01:15:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.janicefergusonsews.com\/blog\/?p=26795"},"modified":"2021-01-01T21:49:49","modified_gmt":"2021-01-02T02:49:49","slug":"desperation-bubble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.janicefergusonsews.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/23\/desperation-bubble\/","title":{"rendered":"Desperation Bubble"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bubble<\/a><\/p>\n

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Have you ever been\u00c2\u00a0 desperate to smock and thwarted in the effort?\u00c2\u00a0 Desperate to stitch hand embroidery and been hampered? Desperate to sew in a power outage?\u00c2\u00a0 I bet the answer is yes.<\/p>\n

It reminds me of my crazy friend Catherine who, 25 years ago, had taken her boys to the beach.\u00c2\u00a0 Settled down in the sand on an old quilt, under her beach umbrella, she pulled out her smocking only to discover that she had everything but a needle!\u00c2\u00a0 Desperate, like me, she walked up and down Daytona Beach asking each sunbather if she might have a #7 crewel needle that Catherine could borrow or buy.\u00c2\u00a0 That, my friends, is desperation.\u00c2\u00a0 To no one’s surprise but Catherine’s, she came up empty handed.<\/p>\n

How this bubble came to be is a result of such desperation.\u00c2\u00a0 It didn’t turn out as planned, it didn’t turn out great,\u00c2\u00a0 it didn’t really please me.\u00c2\u00a0 But it did scratch my itch\u00c2\u00a0 for some form–any form!– of needlework.<\/p>\n

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\"The<\/a>

The ruffles are too skimpy.<\/p><\/div>\n

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With my dream-come-true sewing room, I should never have been in this position.\u00c2\u00a0 But it happened. And here’s how.<\/p>\n

We left a day early for our week in the mountains, with just 45 minutes to pack.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 As we watched the weather channel, we could see that Tropical Storm Andrea was scheduled to deluge the eastern coast from our home in central Florida all the way to our cabin in western North Carolina.\u00c2\u00a0 So we decided to leave ASAP and that boiled down to 3\/4 of an hour. In that kind of rush, I was lucky to grab up clean socks and underwear.<\/p>\n

I had planned to spend those leisurely days smocking a few things for baby Vivian Rose and a few more for 9 year old Laurel Cade.\u00c2\u00a0 Of all the projects I had lined up to prepare, only this ready-to-smock Martha Pullen bubble was actually ready to smock.\u00c2\u00a0 Earlier, my Brother Quattro, a fabulous heirloom machine, made it a breeze to apply the entredeux and tatting.<\/p>\n

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\"sleeve<\/a><\/p>\n

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A few precious packing moments were spent selecting a smocking plate (Gwen Milner’s delicate Carousel Horses<\/em>) and gathering up the necessary skeins of floss.<\/p>\n

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\"il_570xN.303285394\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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After I parked myself on the quiet side deck, I began smocking this straight yoke design onto a round yoke bishop.\u00c2\u00a0 But darned if those dainty horses didn’t turn into short legged draft horses—UGLY!!!\u00c2\u00a0 FYI, the smaller the round yoke, the more distorted picture smocking becomes.\u00c2\u00a0 So what now?<\/p>\n

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\"1037203l\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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I had only the floss for the carousel horses and one other plate (below) which was on the opposite side of the page protector.\u00c2\u00a0 Fortunately, I could make this plate work.\u00c2\u00a0 Given my limited palette of floss colors and the need for a round yoke design, I really lucked out.<\/p>\n

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\"front<\/a><\/p>\n

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Adding to my stress was worry that I would run out of smocking before I ran out of days at the cabin.\u00c2\u00a0 I had just one small project for 10 days!\u00c2\u00a0 The only recourse was to read a lot and spend more time on SewForum, Martha Pullen’s Forum, Pinterest and facebook.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a desperate time, I tell you.<\/p>\n

The other glitches had to do with the modifications I had to make after we returned home.\u00c2\u00a0 Remember that my daughter gave me only two directives about clothes for Vivian Rose:\u00c2\u00a0 1.\u00c2\u00a0 any color was okay so long as it was pink–light pink, dark pink, medium pink, pink stripe, pink print, pink whatever, just so long as it was pink, and 2.\u00c2\u00a0 ruffle bottoms were required.<\/p>\n

I had no matching pink gingham for the ruffles and plain white didn’t suit me.\u00c2\u00a0 Using a print seemed to demand that the print be incorporated into another component of the bubble.\u00c2\u00a0 This pink polka dot cotton seemed to be good enough for both the ruffles and the neck bias, which was applied right on top of the existing gingham binding.<\/p>\n

None of my serger thread was quite the right color so I resorted to using Mettler and DMC cotton threads, which were in short supply.\u00c2\u00a0 In an effort to be certain that I did not run out of thread, I reduced the width of the ruffles to 33″—way\u00c2\u00a0 too short for the 22″ width across the bubble back.<\/p>\n

Oh well.\u00c2\u00a0 I did not have to sit out on the deck in the cool mountain air reading instead of smocking.\u00c2\u00a0 And Vivian Rose does have another pink outfit to wear.<\/p>\n

Have you ever been desperate?\u00c2\u00a0 Tell me about it.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe I will feel better about this desperation bubble.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Have you ever been\u00c2\u00a0 desperate to smock and thwarted in the effort?\u00c2\u00a0 Desperate to stitch hand embroidery and been hampered? Desperate to sew in a power outage?\u00c2\u00a0 I bet the answer is yes. It reminds me of my crazy … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":26799,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[28,5,27,24],"tags":[409,408,1059],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.janicefergusonsews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26795"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.janicefergusonsews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.janicefergusonsews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.janicefergusonsews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.janicefergusonsews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26795"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"http:\/\/www.janicefergusonsews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38868,"href":"http:\/\/www.janicefergusonsews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26795\/revisions\/38868"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.janicefergusonsews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.janicefergusonsews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.janicefergusonsews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.janicefergusonsews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}