Rachelle Keller

I have no life. But did I ever? Nothing new there. I have always been at work on one project or another. The difference is, when I'm self-directed I become distracted and often start a new project when I realize that it isn't going to be as perfect as I originally pictured it. Left to myself for motivation, I never ever get any project done. Now that I'm working on a project in conjunction with Big Al, he pushes me to keep going—to keep going long after the novelty of the new project has worn off. At least we're starting off on "equal ground" with this one. He's new to the software, I'm new to the Big Bad Barudan. We both work along and learn at our own different paces. I was hoping to get something of a "break" today. We needed to move on to the next design, for variety if nothing else, and we didn't have the thread colors needed to accomplish this. But that's okay. It's just a "stitch-out" to see where the errors are i...

Hit the ground running today. Woke up late, so much to do! Visited an embroidery shop with a combined total of about 90 sewing heads. They have machines that have 18 heads running at once on the same project. That's about, oh, 18 times faster than I can run a job so we got a bid from them. My job has been outsourced already. Then off to the local supplier of thread and parts. Got a frame to use with the Big Bad Barudan instead of a hoop. The stitching area is much larger, but a table top is required. With the table top in place, I can't check thread tensions. Frustrating. Luckily, I got most of the adjustments made before I started to run the job. Inhaled a slice of reheated pizza—DiGorno, not delivery—which was fairly easy until I got to the dry-gaggy crusty part. I think that will be stuck in my throat until Tuesday. And, as usual, burned the roof of my mouth on the molten cheese. Nevertheless, it was deeelissshus! Ever do something so stupid you are amazed that you have surv...

We have used up all of the shirts that we bought doing different tests with different colors of thread, appliqué and placement. We'll just go buy more, right? Sure as long as we wanted any color besides black, white, or charcoal grey! I have a black and red color block shirt but it is just crying out for a stitch with red thread. I have maroon, not red. I need red thread. We have other shirts, fisherman-style with a back cape flap, but found that I could not do a vertical hoop on the flap without unstitching the shirt itself. Can't rotate the design because it won't fit in the hoop. What to do? Make up a different design, of course! Big Al is in the middle of that. In the meantime I can trim the loose threads on the shirts I have, prepare appliqué pieces, etc. But I probably won't because I'll forget to do it. Murphy has been living in my machine today anyway. Constantly stopping for one dumb reason or another. But since I'm the queen of troubleshooting and have...

So I have had the Big Bad Barudan running almost constantly since Saturday morning, excepting the challenging "down times" where I learn more about the machines little tiny parts and how just the simplest thing can make the difference between "working" and "not working". We have another shirt! This time a 2XL. Little did I realize that it wasn't finished yet. These shirts have to be put into giant embroidery hoops and it is far from easy. It involves putting the hoop, the stabilizer, the shirt, and the top hoop on the floor, and using both hands and both knees I have to get the damned thing perfectly aligned AND tightly inside the hoop. Today I had to put a whole dollar in the swear jar because I had a shirt hooped, had the pins taken out, was making minor adjustments, and the whole thing popped apart on me. The devil-skull was hooped vertically. To do the "Ride Like the Devil!" I had to rehoop horizontally. That's where the whole dollar...

Big Al is the digital side of our operation. He manipulates most of the artwork on the Big ol' Mac. I'm in charge of the Big Bad Barudan. He does what he knows best, I do what I know best. He likes to manipulate files, I like to do technical mechanical-troubleshooting work. Here he is working on yet another rendition of our devil-skull image. This is a "3-D" image, or rather a stitch mockup made by our fancy- schmancy software that turns out to have some serious limitations. There are many digitizing programs out there on the market but no really good ones for the Mac. So, rather than sink money into something as useless as a PC, we went for Mac software that is actually a plugin for Adobe Illustrator. This also prevented learning all new software. Here is the design actually stitched onto a Dickies size 3XLT shirt and modeled by Big Al. This is the real thing and not a fancy Photoshop trick. For the most part it went really well. We're working on another one at ...

I think I'll begin here with a complete fail . This is our yarmulke-wearing friend completed out. Well, not so much completed as…well…all was pretty lost at the point of the cranium here so I skipped wasting any more thread on the colors in the middle and went straight for the black detail and the flames in the eyes, to make sure that would work alright. It actually didn't. When the black got to the left "ear" area, the machine had reached it's distance limit and could go no further to complete the stitch around the outside. More measuring and more notes. The next file would be a little bit smaller. The next attempt was to see if the total stitch count could be reduced by using a fabric applique background rather than solid stitching. This seemed to work quite well and the mottled grey fabric really added to the overall design. This test was the black and red colors only and the design was rotated on the computer before loading it into the embroidery machine. Tha...