FO: Pokemon Hat & Scarf Set

 

The final hat and scarf set was for my 11 year old nephew and I decided to make it Pokemon themed. He's been into Pokemon for years, so I knew this would be well received. I also knew I had the perfect yarns in my stash to make this happen, which is always nice.

The scarf was actually the first thing I made out of all of these gifts. I made it on the Sentro machine first, but I didn't like how the front yellow section had so many tucked stitches and it looked sloppy. When the Ravenclaw one came out so great on my flat bed machine, I decided to unravel this entire scarf and redo it on the Babylock machine and I'm so happy I did. 

I knew I had this almost full skein of Red Heart Super Saver yarn in yellow - I had only used it for little details here and there on toys over the years and it was in my Ravelry stash as 0.98 skeins left - but I had one heck of a time actually locating the skein. I found it amongst some skeins I had decided to donate years ago and then apparently never did. Good thing I didn't! I made this 50 stitches wide and just knit the yellow until it ran out, which didn't give me quite as long as I wanted it to be. Personally, I like my scarves to be long enough to easily double wrap around my neck and still show the end details, and my nephew is very big for his age, so I wanted this to be 72 inches. When the yellow ran out, I just color blocked in some black. This lead me down the very weird Mandela effect rabbit hole of whether Pikachu's tail has a zig zag of black at the end, which I always thought it did. Turns out that regardless of our personal thoughts on if it was changed at some point, the current games all have his tail as being all yellow and since that was what my nephew would know I just went with a straight transition to black instead of zig zagging it like I thought I would initially. he black is also Red Heart Super Saver, so the transition went well. I knitted about 15 inches more in black and then bound off.

I used kitchener stitch at the ends and mattress stitch along the sides - and man do these take a long time to seam together when they are so long. I took a photo of the kitchener end just to show how it looks. It does have a bit more bulk, but I just steamed the daylights out of it to lay as flat as possible.

The final touch was my home stitched Pikachu patch. I searched through the available Pikachu embroidery files and settled on this one because he looks so happy. This stitched out beautifully if I do say so myself. I used my same black linen scraps for the base and stabilized it well and he looks very professional. I just love him. He definitely makes the whole scarf.

Next up came the hat. I had seen a hat online that looked like a Pokeball and decided that would be my nephew's favorite. The inspiration hat has the button done with intarsia, which I could technically do on my machine, but I didn't know how yet and it would have taken me too long to learn and plot out and probably make this hat a few times to get right, so I decided to just knit the base colors into the hat and then figure out a way to add the circles after. Doesn't this beanie look so late 90s without the circles? How trendy am I? lol This is a picture of the mattress stitched back, which turned out great.

And here is the inside because I think it just looks to cool, lol. It came out very clean and I'm always shocked by how precision the knitting machine makes things look inside. 

Once the hat was made, I had to figure out how to add the button. I had thought of just crocheting one, but that would have been really bulky, as would knitting one. Then I thought about finding an embroidery file and making a patch of just the button, but that would have been hard in the size I needed it. Then it hit me that I could just use a white base fabric and embroider circles of different thicknesses in black. This didn't require any files to do - I just used circles on the machine - and I think it turned out fantastic. The base fabric is a white denim my mom had on hand. Because this was just fabric, it was much easier to sew on than the thicker patches. 

This was the final item I was hurrying to finish so I could pop it in the mail, so my finished hat photos were all taken late at night, thus the lighting in the photos. I think the hat turned out great. If I was to make it again, I would do about 2 rows less of the white, but other than that I am so happy with this one.

And I had to get a photo making the same face as Pikachu, lol. This set is definitely my favorite of the bunch and I was really proud of it. I think the design idea was good as well as the execution, which is just always a nice boost. My nephew loved it on Christmas, which is also the icing on the cake. He now has a custom made but professional looking accessory set for the chilly weather and I hope he loves it for a long time.

Summary:

Yarn: 1 skein of Red Heart Super Saver in Yellow - $ 0.25, 0.23 skeins in Black - $ 0.25

Pattern: None

Notions: Pikachu embroidery file - $ 3.00

Time: 4 hours

WIP Wednesday: Finishing Touches on Gift Making

I've been working pretty diligently to finish up all my gift knits in time to pop them in the mail before Christmas. I managed to finish all the machine knitting on Sunday and then do some machine embroidery. Here is a sneaky peek of my makes...

I have a machine that will embroider, but my mom has a Brother Stellaire, so very much fancier than mine, lol. I opted to make the patches on her machine Sunday night and after a practice run on Spiderman, these all turned out great. Shopping for embroidery files is interesting because a lot of the result seems to depend on your machine, so I'm glad I used my moms new one instead of mine for this part.

I'm now working on sewing everything together and getting it officially done while I wait for 2 patches I ordered from Joann. I made an order specifically for these patches but I added on some fray check and a few random notions just because I was making an order. Well the other things have all arrived but the patches haven't even shipped yet. Of course. So if they don't get here soon then I will have to just machine embroider them as well if I want to make the Christmas deadline with shipping them to North Carolina. Everyone think good thoughts for me!

Are your gift makes going to be done on time? Let me know what you're making too!

Dabbling in Embroidery Design

My niece has turned 1 year old and my sister really wanted her to have a jacket embroidered with her name in a specific design. My mom has a Brother Stellaire XJ1 embroidery machine and Embrilliance software, so she told my sister she could of course make the jacket she wanted, so she sent everything to my mom. Then time passed. My mom bought the software, but she has never learned how to use any part of it, so when the birthday was just a few weeks away, I got involved. I had never used this software at all, but I can use photoshop, so how hard could this be? lol *foreshadowing*

Embrilliance is a software designed to let you import an image and then make an embroidery file of that image. Sadly, it doesn't do it automatically. You have to define the edges and whatnot, but they say once you learn this software that you can make basically any design. That's all well and fine that it's capable of doing these things, but I have to say this is the most un-user-friendly program I've used in ages. Let's just say this is not Adobe - it's like jumping back 15 years in the style of the program and the basic functionality. Add to that the time crunch and the fact that my family wanted something that the program didn't have any presets to do, and I was pretty frustrated.

My sister wanted her daughter's name to look like the 90s Barbie logo - not just the font, but also the white outline and drop shadow. 

This was the inspiration, but reverse the colors. My sister found a font file someone had already made and the example looked just like this, but when you actually open the font you find out that it does not include the drop shadow. So I had to open up the font and try to make it myself.

I did make patches of all the girls names as a test when we first got the font though :) 

The first try at designing gave me a very weirdly shaped background fill, which is not something I ever thought about before this moment, lol. You can see the strange lines in the white area n the screen shot above. After SO MUCH trial and error, this was the best I cud come up with. I was not able to add the white outline all the way around, but I was able to make the white drop shadow, so we called it good. The program is designed to add the stitch information onto your design. You can choose the texture (i.e. satin stitch vs fill stitch, etc.) but you cannot determine the beginning of the design and things like that. The program determines that for you. So, I made the file and took it over to my mom's house for her machine to work its magic. Thankfully we did the first one on a scrap of fabric because this first fil was terrible and I still have no idea why. It started stitching one letter - would stitch just abut 8 or 10 stitches on one side of the letter - then move to a completely different letter and start doing the same thing there. Over and over and over again. It was so maddening that I couldn't watch it, lol. I went back to the drawing board after that one and started the file over on Embrilliance.

The second time seemed to work out much better, so I brought that file over and we tried it again (also on a scrap) This time it worked out alright with just a few minor errors that could be blamed on the cheap thread we were using as practice. So we were ready to add the actual jacket. Notice how nice and even the lines are developing above, lol. The challenge on the official jacket was figuring out how to center this design in an after market hoop and keep things like the sleeves out of the way while still keeping the 12 month size jacket in place. After much arguing over the best method which lead to watching several completely rambling and pointless you tube videos), I centered it how I knew made sense and we let it stitch. 49 minutes later, we had this:

Hallelujah! Is it perfect? Not really. But it is a far cry better than what I was worried it would turn out like after all the attempts and this major learning curve I was slung into at such short notice. Really the only "flaw" is that we didn't check the needle before we started and it was so blunt that it actually cased runs in the fabric across the area it did before I saw and stopped it. No one notices this in real life, only if you are scrutinizing it, so I just won't tell lol.

Doesn't my niece look adorable? Everyone loved her jacket in her 1 year old pictures and she's been wearing it a lot now that it's cold out. My sister has already bought the next size up and wants her to always have a jacket with this embroidery, so it looks like I will be getting lots of practice with making this design over the years.

I'm glad to have been kind of forced to learn how to do this. Now it's just a matter of finding good tutorials on how to use this software more to my advantage and then just start embroidering everything :)