Whatever the name, we’ll get to that in a bit. Our foray into textiles started with learning how to use the sewing machines, how to turn using them, and how to do applique. The results were as follows:
From there we started on making a drawstring bag by following a pattern. With the help of the illustrious Emilie and Maxx, the following creation came forth from my sewing machine:
That completed the first week. The second week was when we looked at digital embroidery, which was a lot of fun to watch albeit a little bit like watching pain dry at times. I chose to do an embroidery of yet another Overwatch character, this time, the rocket wielding Egyptian, Pharah:
With this knowledge, we were ready to embark on our project, in my case that was to make a bat plushie that had its face embroidered on instead of using the applique method mentioned in the instructions, and also to add a fun yet possibly confusing embroidery of a batman symbol on its chest. So off I went with so much gusto and exuberance….that I forgot to take a lot of pictures of the process…a mistake I only discovered once I placed the last stitch…
I got a picture of the batman symbol embroidery, and then of course of the final…somewhat derpy final product.
In general, I think it came out better than I expected. The way I approached sewing was by sewing the same way I weld…which does help to have that in mind since the process is similar. However the materials act nothing like steel or aluminum. So there was some cursing when trying to sew the soft stretchy fleece-y material, especially when using a regular straight stitch. A bit of googling told me that for stretchy fabrics, it might be useful to use either a double needle stitch, a special stretch stitch, or simply a narrow zigzag. I chose to go with the narrow zigzag and it actually helped A LOT! my pieces did not more as much in relation to each other while trying to sew them together. Some swearing was still uttered during the process, but no project is a good project without some of that. Even with the bit of a “fivehead” (more than a forehead) that my plushie has, I think I could have done a lot worse.