What type of hoop do you like?

I've been embroidering since I was a kid and there is only one type of embroidery hoop I know; a round wood one with a screw for tightening it. 

When I was talking to my sister today she was lamenting not being able to find her favourite hoop. So, I figured I'd just bring up the same round hoop on Amazon and send her one. At one time I had a set of steel hoops with cork inlay for holding the fabric, that had a spring on the outer ring so there wasn't any tightening adjustment, but it has disappeared. It didn't hold as tight as the screw type, but it was real easy to use especially for older people who might have difficulty tightening the screw. (Who am I lidding, I'm starting to have trouble!)

I just went online to look for the simple little hoop I'm accustomed to and WOW have times changed!

There is the typical wood variety:

Then the more modern plastic ones:

The same thing in oval:

There is a square type:

There is a rectangular variety with the screw on the corner:

Then there is a peculiar spring type hoop:

Have you ever tried a clip frame?:

I wonder what different types people use and what they like or dislike about them? Comments? Please? Inquiring minds want to know.

Tree trunk

We've either had weather too hot to go outside, or too much rain to go outside. Either way we've been mostly stuck in the house instead of out on the scooters. We uploaded some videos that we did with the cheap body cam, but the movements were choppy even after applying stabilization software and we're dying to do them again with the GoPro because it's just so much nicer. We'll just have to wait for better weather.

Of course bad weather means I've had some time for stitching. I decided to start the embroidered landscape with the large tree on the right, working with 3 strands of thread. To get a more realistic tree trunk I used one dark and one medium brown. I cut the same length of thread for each colour and separated each of them them into 3 strands giving me 2 sets of medium and 2 sets of dark threads. I put one set of each colour aside. Then out of the second set, I pulled 1 strand out of the dark thread and 1 strand out of the medium thread. I paired 1 strand of dark with 2 of medium and 1 strand of medium with 2 of dark. 

That gave me two multi-colour sections of thread of similar but different shades. Then I used a split stitch on the trunk and limbs. When the first two sections of thread were used up, I repeated the process on the sections I had laid aside. It resulted in a nice effect on the tree trunk.

I don't really want to work on the tree leaves yet, so I think I'll start on the flowers at the bottom next.

The beginning of the second landscape picture

I mentioned that I was planning on more embroidered landscapes and I purchased several adult colouring books of landscapes for this purpose. I wanted pictures that had something to draw you in, like the first one with stepping stones leading up to the gazebo. After perusing the 4 or 5 books I bought, I was thoroughly frustrated. 

Many of the pictures had faded mountains in the background, which are easy to colour, but not so easy to realistically stitch. Others had large sections of rocks, rocky cliffs or other boring sections that wouldn't lend themselves to interesting stitching.

In lots of pictures I liked the right side, but not the left, or vice versa. Many of the flowers were depicted as one or two oversized blooms surrounded by lots of non-descript leaves.

One of the old mill pictures was interesting, but the river was flowing at 90 degrees to the mill wheel!?! The only way to fix it would have been to draw the bottom third of the picture free hand. If I could draw anything somewhat realistic I wouldn't have needed the colouring books to start with.

The birds and animals were totally unrealistic. I mean REALLY unrealistic. I though some of the ducks were odd shaped rocks. One of the ducks had 1 leg under the beak and one under the tail. What's up with that!

I finally decided to take the portions of several drawings and amalgamate them into something I liked that I could reasonably stitch. I took the left side of one drawing and flipped it to make the right side of the page. Then I took the top portion of another left hand page, replaced some of the trees with something that worked better. I added in a more interesting shoreline from another picture, and a cluster of flowers under the tree on the right, as well as some reeds along the bottom of the page.

I went back afterward to mark which pictures I used, so that I'd have a clearer reference page to stitch from, and I can't tell which ones I used. Some portions were flipped to mirror image, some re-sized, and some drawn free hand to connect the pieces together.

This is the image I ended up with. Some of the trees on the left are probably meant to be done in fall colours, but with the cluster of flowers on the lower right, that would be out of season. 

The  little pink mark denoted the centre of the page. It let me pin the centre of the fabric to the centre of the page for tracing.

 

Being injured has made me feel far less energetic and the project is kind of stalled, but as I heal up my energy is returning, so I hope to have a little something to show soon.

Troubles upon troubles

As if getting hit by a car wasn't enough, the following Saturday we noticed that although the air conditioning was on, the house was getting hotter and hotter. Then we noticed that the fan in the air conditioner wasn't turning. The unit was only 9 years old with a 10 year warranty. Being under warranty is great, but try getting a technician to come out and look at it on the weekend. It was going to be $300 for a house call, just to look at it and see what needed to be done. 

Hubby, being smart, asked how much taking a look at it would cost on Monday. If we waited, the cost would only be $100, so he told them to come on Monday and we suffered through the heat. In the interim, he pulled out all of the paperwork and emailed it to them, letting them know that it was still under warranty.

On Monday the technician arrived bright and early, checked out the fan to see that it still wasn't turning, made sure the fuses were still OK, and the thermostat was correctly set. Hubby had already checked for the obvious things, like wrong setting on the thermostat or blown fuse, but the guy had to see for himself before he started work on the unit.

He removed the side of the machine and told us he could see right away what had happened. So could we. Two little electrocuted mice.

After removing the offending rodents, he checked out the rest of the unit and replaced a slightly rusted capacitor. It was still functioning, but I think that in order to have the visit covered under the warranty he had to replace something, as mice aren't a warranty issue.

In the end, the visit didn't cost us anything except a sweaty weekend.

Uh oh! and look what we got!

Not too long after we got my hubby his scooter we were T-boned. The passenger side of the car was crumpled in, all of the air bags deployed and I ended up with a couple of broken ribs and a bruise on my thigh the size of a basketball as well as bent frames on my glasses. The car was a write off and since it was an older vehicle we didn't carry collision insurance on it.

Hubby was shaken up and ached all over, but otherwise unhurt. Initially all I felt was the impact to my leg, and when we were asked by the paramedics if we needed to go to the hospital, we both declined. The driver and passengers of the other car were likewise shaken up but not seriously injured.

I noticed the next day that I was having trouble taking a deep breath and I figured that my ribs were bruised or possibly fractured and knowing that even if they were broken, nothing could be done until they healed on their own, I wasn't too worried. However, every time I coughed or sneezed, the unexpected pain made me yelp so my, ever solicitous honey, insisted on calling the doctor, who sent me for x-rays. Yup. Broken ribs. Thus ended out scooter rides for a while.

That really bummed me out because scooters don't put any pressure on ribs! My honey wasn't taking chances, so I got to sit and do nothing. For days! I was going stir crazy.

The enforced inactivity was good for one thing. It left a lot of computer time to search out used cars. We had been thinking of buying a new electric or hybrid vehicle, but after some investigation, decided to go with gas. The Impala we had been driving gave my tall hubby lots of leg room, and lots of power for passing on the highway, so we were looking for something similar. My family is mostly in Toronto and his is mostly in Windsor, which means lots of highway driving. After looking at the specs on thousands of cars, we finally bought a 2011 Chev Malibu. 

Sixteen days after the accident we had wheels again, and hubby immediately bought me my own TurboAnt because my old scooter couldn't keep up with him.

While waiting for our new (used) car we received our order for a small wearable camera. It's hard to take pictures of what we see on our scooter rides because by the time you realize there'd a family of ducks waddling along the trail and get your camera out, they've already flown away or you've zipped by and missed them.

We tried it out clipped onto a t-shirt, but it flopped around a lot and mostly took pictures of the road. So hubby added a fixed position mount onto the top of an old ball cap, which worked really well. 

There were some problems though, like pink leaves that were actually green.

Also, every wobble of the scooter or the camera resulted in headache producing bouncing as the camera was jostled up and down. The files created were huge, and running stabilization software took forever and produced an on again off again black border in places. That was fixed by adding a black frame around the video. Each one of the changes took huge amounts of time to adjust for the camera's limitations.

Part of the reason for doing these videos was so that hubby's brother, who has MS and can barely get out of bed, let alone get out of the house, could get to join us on our scooter rides and enjoy some of the sights and sounds of summer. So we bit the bullet, and ordered a GoPro camera.

AMAZING!

No pink leaves, no wobble when going over broken pavement, no bouncing up and down over speed bumps. Just steady, level, images with decent quality even on the lowest resolution.

Here's a link to a short, speeded up video so you can see for yourself:

www.rsbriggs.com/gopro/mp.mp4

TurboAnt

 For Christmas 2019 hubby and I bought each other folding scooters. (Folding scooters mean that you can fold them and carry them in one hand to go into a store, or store them in the trunk of the car.) Before you think that we must be rich to afford such luxury items, let me just say that they were on sale with a deep discount and the store we bought them from gave an additional 10% discount if you signed up for their newsletter, which we both did. We've had them for several years and they've been a lot of fun.

The scooters with 8 inch wheels had a maximum rider weight of 220 pounds, went a maximum speed of 20 kmh and a maximum distance of 12K. They were perfect for quick little trail rides except that my sweetheart being 6 foot 3 hit at close to the maximum weight and the specs are based on a rider of about 110 pounds so he went slower for shorter distances and a few times his unit conked out before the end of our ride. He only had to walk about a block, each time, but that sure put a damper on our fun.

Last year his battery seemed to drain really fast making our rides shorter and shorter and the charging time seemed longer and longer. We tried to get a replacement battery, but none were available for this specific unit, so we tried buying an aftermarket battery of the same type and he built a box to house the new battery mounting it on the stem with a switch to go from the original battery to the new one. The new one with the same specs as the original battery worked for about 2 minutes at full speed, then it needed a rest before it could run for another 2 minutes. Not fun.

Before all this trouble I was wishing that we had units that were just a little better. I wanted just a little more clearance between the deck and the road so that we could go over the many speed bumps on our crescent without scraping bottom. Just a little more speed so that hubby could go up minor inclines without having to kick all the time. Just a little more power so that we could take them to the store AND back. We used them when we had to take the car in for repairs and they made it back home OK, but they needed hours for a full charge so that we could go back and pick the car up again.

I started researching folding scooters, this time looking for a manufacturer that readily supplied replacement batteries. Most scooters have the battery in the deck which puts the weight on the bottom and allows for better balance, but it also means that when you go over bumps and scrape the bottom, what's hitting the road is the battery. I found a scooter that had 10 inch wheels, which gave ample road clearance. The battery was detachable and mounted on the stem, not in the deck, and you could buy the unit bundled WITH a spare battery. It was also rated for a little more speed and a little more distance on a single charge. So in March I insisted hubby get one for his birthday.

Yay! we can go on trips without hubby having to kick all the time on his sore ankle and his scooter doesn't conk out before we get home. The TurboAnt scooter was pricey, $729 (the base unit without the spare battery was $529 Canadian) including taxes and shipping but it's specs are 30 Miles (48 km) Max Range, 20 mph (32 km/h) Max Speed 10-Inch inflatable tires, 275 lb (125 kg) Max Load and 6-Hour Fast Charging. Best of all, delivery took less that a week (3 business days) and they included a spare inner tube as well.

Bicycle riding is healthier, but since my sweetie has trouble with his back and some issues with the bones in his ankle, bicycle riding is a bit of an ordeal for him. I'm not much better as my knees protest with even short rides. We used to make a 5 mile round trip by way to the trails down to the park and back almost daily. This year we made one trip and both of us spent the remainder of the evening propped up with ice packs. The scooters let us get some fresh air and a change of scenery without as much pain.

Landscape embroidery

 I have just realized that a post I thought I had done some time ago is still sitting unpublished on my computer. During our enforced home lockdown during the pandemic, I amused myself by embroidering 5 large floral pictures, but I thought about doing a landscape picture to hang on the wall. I looked at adult colouring books and found some possibilities and ordered the most likely books.

While waiting for the books to arrive I went out and purchased several frames (five). After the butterflies, I'm not getting caught again without appropriate size frames.

I found one or two realistic landscapes I could use and selected one with a stream in the foreground with stepping stones leading across to a gazebo surrounded by trees and fields.

I pre-shrunk some cotton material. I've learned my lesson after ruining one tapestry size project, always wash the fabric first. Then I cut out a large rectangle, laid it over the selected picture and traced the image in pencil, omitting some parts I didn't want and modifying others. 

After I had my drawing done it was time to select colours. I have over a hundred shades of different colour skeins of threads, both the old Coats and Clark Anchor threads and the DMC threads from when I did petit point. I needed to sort out what colours and what shades of colour I wanted to use for each element. I used 3 strands of thread throughout and selected stitch types that best allowed following the natural contours of the object I was working on.

Selecting colours took several days as I planned things out. When you need to blend shades of colours, you have to make sure that you have enough of the colours you want to use for the entire project, not just the segment you're working on.

I think I used 7 colours in the stream, which I then couldn't use for the sky. I had several trees and bushes each of which took at least 3 shades of green. When you have grass, overlapping flowers, overlapping bushes, overlapping trees, overlapping more trees, the colours have to have enough contrast so that you can distinguish one from the other.

I decided to do the gazebo in white, which in terms of thread colour, was white, light cream, dark cream, beige and pale brown. I started with the bottom of the roofline doing rows of couching stitch in white, then the pillars also in white using a romanian couching stitch. for the caps of the pillars did a short row of fly stitch. I used an outline stitch for the roof and segments. The fill-in for the dome was done in long and short stitch using thread shades in light and dark with the palest shades in the middle of each segment.The base of the cupola was done in chain stitch followed by several rows of couching stitch and topped with tight rows of fly stitch and a few sraight stitches for the peak. The lower part of the gazebo was done in chain stitch, with long and short stitches for the inner part of the gazebo and satin stitch and split stitch for the floor and stairs. That's 9 different stitches just in the gazebo.

I didn't stop to take in progress pictures, but while I was working on it, my sweetheart was posting some things on our website and he took pictures of what I was doing and uploaded them. Grr! I don't mind the picture taking, but I don't like displaying half done work. At least that means I can show you what I did in detail.

The stepping stones and rocks at the water's edge, parts of the daffodils and the crocus flowers were done in satin stitch. The water, sky and background grass were all done in long and short stitch, blending two to seven shades of colour for each area. Long and short stitch works really well for blending colours.  There are 7 shades of blue in the water and 6 different shades of blue in the sky. The daffodils were done in daisy stitch, satin stitch, split stitch and straight stitch. The grass in the foreground used 2 shades of green in fly stitch.

The tree trunks were stitched in 3 shades of brown using a split stitch and the leaves were sewn using a daisy stitch in either 2 or three shades of green. I thought sewing every individual leaf was time consuming, until I had to go back and fill in the spaces between the leaves with tiny straight stitches. Doing those fill in stitches took me a whole week and I'm not even sure if it wouldn't have looked better just to fill in the large areas and leave the itty bitty one tiny stitch areas blank.

The original image called for lots of background shrubs and trees and fields which don't lend themselves to stitching, so I opted to replace them with a field of grass. I chose 2 shades of a bright green that would stand out behind the shrubs, trees and flowers and filled in the area with vertical long and short stitch, which contrasts with the horizontal water and sky. Since I omitted the shrubs that were in front of the trees on the left, I had to extend the tree trunk to come down behind the gazebo so the it didn't look like the tree was floating in the air.

The low lying shrubs to the right of the gazebo were done with rows of  open daisy stitch. I kept on debating whether I should fill in the open area, but it felt like it would bring more attention to an area I wanted to fade into the background so I left them blank.

The original diagram had tulips along the water's edge, but they were so much smaller than the daffodils in the foreground, tulips didn't make sense so I changed them to crocuses. The weird little lumps that were supposed to be on the right didn't have definite shape or position so I replaced them with evergreens that I did in a vandyke stitch that lent itself to an evergreen shape.

The rest of the picture was filled in with long and short stitches in six shades of blue. Now that it's done I wish that I had worked with lighter shades of blue for the sky. 

I also wish that I had paid more attention to the size of the picture. The image is 6.5 inches across. I stitched some extra so that the stitching would go under the mat in the frame. The interior size of the mat is an opening 8 inches wide. I added about a half inch on each side  which left me with a finished size of about 7.5 inches, which was not quite enough. I can fix it by sewing a little more along the edge, except that I'm not sure which colour I used where. I started out keeping track of which colours I was using, but stopped at the last couple of shades, which just happen to be the ones along the right hand side of the picture. It will be easier to just swap out the mat for a wider one.

If you were counting, that's 12 different stitches in the whole picture. Thirteen shades of blue, twenty one shades of green. Twelve shades of brown, five shades of cream, four shades of yellow, one shade of pink and one shade of purple. 

I bought 5 frames and only one is filled. I just went on line and ordered some more colouring books. I wonder if I have enough thread or if I should order more colours just in case.