Summer is...

Red Work Embroidery!

Well, it's not perfect!

But I warned you it would be a challenge for me to add the "summer sayings" to my clothesline design. 

The clothesline design and alphabet lettering came already programmed in my Janome machine.

(There probably is embroidery computer software out there that would let me put this together in one design to stitch out.  But that's another story because of the issues using a PC versus a MAC computer.)  

The top part, "Summer is..."

 I added using my machine's embroidery monogram alphabet in "block". 

It's 3.9 inches long by .8 inches tall. 

I used my 4 by 4 embroidery hoop.  

That turned out pretty good. 

The IKEA Ribba frames I bought in the wrong size for some prints I had turned out to be ideal for framing the red work embroidery design.  

For the bottom "summer sayings" I switched to my machine's ordinary sewing decorative stitches.  Again using my machine's "block" alphabet.   First I marked what I thought hoped were parallel stitch lines.  No embroidery hoop used here just straight stitching across.  I picked a few "summer" sayings I liked.   

I programmed the first line which went ok until the end when I realized I forgot to program the line to stop and it started to repeat the line again.  It repeated the first letter of the first word in the line...the "s" before I manually stopped it.  So I thought I would program it to continue with "unshine" so it spelled "sunshine" at the end of the first line.  

Of course, it didn't go quite right.  I placed the last part of the word too far to the right so there was too big of a space between the "s" and the "unshine".  So, I added another "s" between the first "s" and the "unshine" and tried to pick out the first "s".  

The end result is the "s" is a little messy because it's almost impossible to pick the stitches out.   

Are you dizzy yet with all the "s"s?

I am!  

Of course, I can't make just one goof!

Second mistake.. I added a second comma at the end of the last word in the last line because I forgot I already had one inserted.

Sorry for the low light and fuzzy photo here.

At that point I decided to leave it alone because I would never be able to pick out the second comma.   

It's easier to tell myself that it makes the stitchery more real homemade with the mistakes and not store-bought this way.

Yeah...ha!

I'll be sewing more of these and I can always replace this design (thank goodness).  

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Funny cartoon of the day:

Source:  Pinterest