BLOCKS DONE AND SEWING TOGETHER HAS BEGUN

I have finished embroidering the Noah's Ark blocks.  Some days I was able to squeeze in two blocks most days it took all day to finish one!  I put just under 1,000,000 stitches on my wonderful Dream Machine 2. I used up 25 pre-wound bobbins.  That's a lot of bobbin thread. Fortunately I buy them by the gross (144 at a time). Here is a screen shot of one of the blocks on my embroidery machine screen. It is a block that had over 50,000 stitches and just he stitching took about 2 hours. Add to that thread changes, applique trimming and various interruptions is took about 4-1/2 hours. It really is fun watching the design appear as it is being stitched.

Here is a pile of all the blocks before they were trimmed. I really have not like how tile work, what this design is, go together.  It's very difficult to get everything to line up.  For example one block has the body of a zebra minus the hear and legs.  Those parts are on two other blocks and it all must be stitched together so that the head is not shifted up from the body and the bottom of the legs line up with the top of the legs.

In order to get things as lined up as possible I decided it was more important to trim each block to the exact same size  with an exact 1/2" seam allowance which the pattern called for. I was able to use my 8-1/2" square ruler with good accuracy. The trimming went fairly quickly.

The next challenge was how to be sure my blocks didn't shift while sewing them. Normally I would use pins or glue. Yes, you read that right glue. However neither of those methods would work well here.  Pins would not work because with all the thread in the embroidery the blocks are pretty stiff. Pins just won't go through the two blocks and keep things flat.  Glue wouldn't work

mainly because when you use it you need to press your seams to one side.  When doing tile work because of all the bulk and stiffness from the embroidery thread you press all seams open. So what to do?  Enter wonder clips!   Those are the little purple clips in the picture. They worked wonderfully, and the hold tightly enough I could clip the two blocks together and then fold the top one back to check the alignment.  It wasn't fool proof but I was able to get half the blocks together with only a very few small misalignments.

Here's my sewing work in progress.  I decided I was not going to push myself to finish it today.  I have learned from experience that when I push too hard, as I get toward the

end I start to get sloppy and make stupid mistakes.  To make it all worse I'm sick of working on it and don't bother to correct the mistakes.  I guess that when the ADD and lack of focus kicks in big time. So I quite today after I got the first 10 blocks together.  I am very happy with that progress.







Below is the top half of the Noah's Ark wall hanging.  Tomorrow I will hopefully finish the bottom half and connect the two pieces. After that I will need to put on a backing with a layer of lightweight batting in between.  Then the next tricky part is stitching in the ditch between the blocks to hold everything together without the stitching sewing.  I don't like clear nylon thread, but I may just have to get over that for here and use it.  I haven't decided yet. Then I will finish it with a 1/2" binding so it will look like a frame around the picture.  My goal is to have it all completed by the end of next week!