the daily digest

Well I did not accomplish most of my goals from last week because instead of doing other stuff over the holiday weekend and saving embroidery for weekdays, I embroidered all weekend. But let’s rewind first.

It took me longer to hem this than I expected.
Why did I hem it now? I did let it hang to see if it would stretch prior to this but I know those bias cut sections are probably going to stretch more. I wanted to go ahead and hem it to protect that raw edge while I work with it. If I have to undo it and redo it later after more stretching, I will.

Really loving the movement. I have a video of me in it, but apparently I can’t make them small enough to fit anymore… so oh well!

Anyway, got it hemmed, took it off the waistband and cut the basting stitches and it was finally time to start embroidering this thing.

Luna was not happy she could not lay next to me the whole time.

She slept in my project box instead.

I tackled this the same way I did Bespin, since it’s the exact same fabric LOL. No stabilizer, very light tension in my hoop. It took me Thursday night, Friday, part of Saturday, Sunday, and part of Monday to get the one back panel done.

Last night I took it upstairs to the dressform to see how it was looking. The bias areas had shortened quite a bit.

They relaxed some after streaming and some light stretching.

(And oops I wasn’t paying attention and ironed it on the right side to start with and melted 2 sequins LOL Thankfully they just came off in chunks and didn’t ruin the fabric)

This morning:

I am mostly happy with how it’s looking, it’s gaining that crinkled look, but still a little concerned about shrinkage. Going to change my workflow from here on out.

First, I’m going to leave it alone and let it hang for the next day and see how it behaves. It’s really hard to not work on it today because I’ve been on a roll! But I want to see what happens with it hanging for a day before I keep going.

Second, I’m going to stop using the hoop as intended – still going to use it, but i feel like even putting it on with the lightest tension is going to keep causing problems. I’m going to just drape it over the hoop and test with using my clips on the edges to just lightly hold it in place while I work. Also going to test out some tissue paper as a stabilizer.

So today that leaves me feeling kinda lost. I guess tonight I will grab one of the blouse pieces and start doing flowers, and adding more sequins.

I’ve also been doing some art stuff, so I’ll do that some today too so I don’t feel like I’m wasting time.

I’m looking at doing stickers for Dragoncon instead of badge ribbons. Everybody loves stickers right?? I found a sticker places that looks like it’ll work for what I want – I want to do small batches of like 10 per design and have like 100-200 to hand out? Thinking maybe 200 that way I also have them for Celebration, so obviously I’m going to focus on Star Wars stuff, and my first thought was simplify some of my Padme pieces from the Padme project for stickers.

I brought these into procreate on my ipad – I was hoping I could just take the original line work, turn it all black, and then do solid colors, but once I looked at my old line work (done with the wacom tablet in photoshop) I decided to just redraw them all. Linework in procreate is SOOOOO much cleaner!

Obviously I’m not going to do all of these. I was having fun doing these and just kept pulling AOTC ones. From AOTC I’m probably going to do Lake, Picnic and Tatooine because those are my costumes, and I do want the stickers to be related to my costuming! So maybe Packing too. I do have Cut Senate and Travel somewhat done – struggling with how to simplify the pattern on Travel and got bored of the jewelry on Cut Senate LOL. I’m avoiding wedding!

But today I think I’ll move on to ROTS because I want to do Liberty Dies.

Besides the stickers I want to do of this project, I remembered I drew all of those little “chibi” versions of my costumes – you can see a few in this post here.

I did these for a new navigation on my site — but also with stickers in mind. So of course I want to do a few of those too. I had all of my costumes through 2024 drawn up, so I had to do the missing 2025 ones:

Of those it’s really hard to pick which ones I want to do, and do I want to do the same ones as the Padme ones? IE do I want to have the “normal” Padme lake dress art as a sticker AND the chibi version too? That feels like overkill. I think for both I just need to pick the popular characters so it’s not COMPLETELY tied to my costumes. And maybe for the chibis I stick more with Leia.

So if I keep to 100 that means I pick 10:
1. Padme Project – Picnic
2. Padme Project – Lake
3. Padme Project – Tatooine
4. Padme Project – Parade
5. Padme Project – Liberty Dies
6. Chibi – Wedding Leia
7. Chibi – Classic Leia
8. Chibi – Bespin Leia
9. Chibi – Scarlet Witch
10. Chibi – Anne Boleyn?

If I expand to 200 I’d also do:
11. Padme Project – Red Senate
12. Padme Project – Funeral
13. Padme Project – Packing
14. Padme Project – Flame Handmaiden
15. Padme Project – Veranda Nightgown
16. Chibi – Ceremonial Leia
17. Chibi – Padme Tatooine
18. Chibi – Padme Lake
19. Chibi – Padme Packing
20. Chibi – Padme Picnic (I’d have to draw it but whatev)

Maybe I need to do a poll on IG and see if people prefer chibi or Padme project as stickers.

In other news, Chase surprised me with this new flag for the front porch:

LOL I love it! I wanted a Star Wars one but not like generic rebel symbol.

The long weekend was great. It felt like a 4 day weekend because Chase got off so early on Friday. We ran errands that afternoon after I got off work. Saturday went and got breakfast and went to the grocery. Skipped our homechef that night and Chase cooked a steak, it was great. Sunday had dinner with my parents:

Dad’s drink came in this cute panda cup LOL

Yesterday my plan was to embroider all day but instead we went to the outlet mall down in Southaven. Chase wanted to go to Nike and I wanted to see the where our Pottery Barn/Williams Sonoma outlet moved to. I ended up with a sweatshirt and sports bra from Nike. Sweatshirt was a win but I’m going to have to take up the straps on the sports bra, it was apparently made for someone who is 7ft tall but wears a size small sports bra.

Anyway I think that’s it. Work is irritating. Anxious over Picnic Padme. Gonna sink into some art for the rest of the day…

Goals this week:
-start flowers on blouse parts tonight
-get back to skirt embroidery tomorrow
-maybe do my duct tape dummy this weekend since I skipped doing it this weekend

Also realized I’m going to have to add more panels to my underskirt. Was trying to get away with it being pretty small so save on fabric but I think I’m going to have to order more and put in a couple more panels. So I’m glad I haven’t done the second round of dyeing yet.