I won't give up

During the week my prethreaded bobbins, the thread rack and iron on stabilizer was delivered.  I had a busy weekend, but had scheduled an hour on Sunday afternoon to return to that learning curve.

the threads look great  on the rack, much tidier

Today I had another attempt with my embroidery machine.  I didn't make much progress, but any progress is acceptable.  I am now convinced that I need to start with a more co-operative material, t-shirt material has too much give in it.  Hopefully when I master the machine I can revisit the t-shirt.

I did use the iron on stabilizer and it adhered nicely to the t-shirt, however manipulating the hoop onto the shirt was not easy, getting it stretched tight was even more of a challenge and the putting it on the machine without all the excess t-shirt getting tangled up, or folder under the hoop deserved a medal, but I did it.

Cactus pattern

Next I followed the instructions carefully again, using the same cactus pattern as before - because I had already got the first color for that pattern threaded on the  machine.  I pressed the start button and it did start quietly enough, but almost immediately it repeated the behavior from last week and attempted to cram the entire t-shirt into the bobbin area.  It took me some time to remove it, clean out the thread and I rethreaded the bobbin to make sure that was not the issue.

Then I cut the section of t-shirt so that I no longer had to try to manipulate the entire wad of the garment and to give me a fighting chance to get it on the hoop correctly.  When I pressed start this time it looked like it was doing a neat outline of the first side of the cactus, then it did some weird movement inside the cactus outline, but was still moving smoothly, so I waiting.  Suddenly it appeared to get furious and started hammering up and down in the same spot.  I pressed the stop button again and the result was another hole in the fabric, with a tight ball of t-shirt and thread knotted together, there was no matting of thread this time however, so that was a good sign.

if you look very closely. on the left you can just about see the outline
of the left arm of the cactus.  On the right of the picture you can see the
wad of thread I had to remove from the bobbin after the first attempt.

My next excusion into the world of machine embroidery will be when I find a piece of stiff cotton fabric that perhaps won't give into the temptation to disappear down the bobbin hole until the pattern has been completed.  Clearly I am being too ambitious expecting to be able to embroider a t-shirt off the bat.  But I will get there, now it is a challenge, I have to do it!