Stitches and punctures

The embroidery is coming along slowly. I decided that I wanted a big chunk of flowers in this next picture and chose to work in 3 shades of purple with some olive green leaves. I used satin stitch for the petals in a light mauve and a thinner border of satin stitch in a darker shade. The centres were done in large french knots It's hard to suggest different shapes of leaves when they're so tiny, so I decided to work with a basic daisy stitch in a 5 stitch grouping. More or less.

The picture had 2 different types of flowers, with a smaller flower type clustered around the outer edge of the first group and I chose to use yellow for them. I did a basic daisy shape in a lighter yellow and switched to a darker yellow for the centre which I did in a large french knot. A lighter green was selected for the leaves which I did in rows of fly stitch.

I started the reeds in a different shade of green using a couching stitch, but now that it's started I'm not happy with the colour. I want more of a contrast between the leaves of the yellow flowers and the reeds, but I don't think I've got the colours I want in my stash.

Since I patched together pieces from different colouring pages, there are places where it's hard to figure out what should go where. When I'm looking at the execution of the project I'm going to have to wing it in a lot of areas. That's not so bad when you're colouring a picture, but it's very disheartening to have to "erase" hours of stitching because it didn't work out the way you wanted it to or it's not looking quite right.

We had the scooters out again trying to finish off our tour of Professor's Lake. We started the first part of the trip when we'd just got the scooters and we didn't know how far we could go until we'd run out of power. Like most rechargeable devices you start out with full charge, in this case 5 bars, but the bars at the full end have more power that the ones at the low end. The bar at the full end means I can go uphill fast. The one at the low end means I might not make it uphill at all. We started with an almost full charge, but half way around the lake the scooters got very sluggish and we didn't want to get to the point where we didn't have enough juice to get home. Hubby has a bad ankle and walking any distance is painful so we didn't want to take a chance and cut the trip short.

The Professor's Lake trail goes three quarters of the way around the lake. The other quarter is bordered by the street. The Rec centre is in the middle of the trail and accessible by car. We approach the trail from one of the ends and usually ride our bikes or scooters from one end to the other of the trail and then turn around to come back. On our attempt to finish the trip around the lake my sweetie got a flat tire. No apparent puncture, we didn't run over glass or anything else, it was just suddenly flat.

Fortunately we were close to the Rec centre so hubby switched scooters with me and took off home leaving me to sit in the shade waiting while he zipped home and grabbed the car. Our scooters are foldable so it's easy to pop them in the trunk.

When we got home we inspected the tire and couldn't find and cut or puncture so we re-inflated the tire and it seemed to stay inflated. We took a quick trip around the block and the tire stayed up, but a couple of days later when we went to take them out for a ride, the tire was flat again.

It was necessary to disassemble the rear tire to change the flat, which is a bit of a pain in the butt. We had already invested in the lever tools that help with changing the tires when we had our old scooters which made getting the tire off the rim fairly easy. 

Inflating the tires is  an exercise in aggravation. See the picture? The wheels are so small that it's hard to get the end of the air hose attached to the valve. The straight end is too long to fit in the space available and we really needed a right angle end to fit it. We ordered a right angle extension hose which fit nicely into the valve space, but the opposite end didn't fit the compressor air hose. GRRR! We also ordered a small manual air pump, but the end of the pump hose didn't want to attach to the valve either!! However, the end of the manual pump hose did fit onto the end of the new extension, so we now have a way to manually pump up the tire if we run into a similar situation while on the road.

What's really frustrating is that unless you have an air hose with a gauge you don't know if you've put enough air in. Then when you try to attach a manual gauge to check the air pressure, you have to mess around with the valve so much in that tight little space, that you let out all the air you just put in! At this point we remembered that we had the portable compressor in the car with the built in gauge and right angle end. Thank heaven!

Our TurboAnt scooters came with spare inner tubes so we replaced the inner tube, then realized that the position for the valve hole in  the rim was off centre between the spokes and the way we inserted the inner tube positioned the right angled valve up against  the spoke instead of away from it making it impossible to attach a hose to the valve. Fortunately we noticed that fact before we had reassembled the tire. We finally got the new inner tube in and the tire inflated. There is a leak in the old inner tube but it's on the side of the tire so I'm wondering if it was just a defective tire.

Enough of this nonsense,  I want to get honeycomb tires.