Original text by: Marina Belova
When it's getting colder everyone starts asking for embroidered socks, gloves and mittens. Perhaps, because the embroidery on the items of that kind still looks fresh and original.
Last year I received such an order and accepted it, to my own misfortune (I did not have any special hoops or devices). Well, I found trouble.
How much I regretted my decision in the course of making the embroidery, I cannot possibly tell you without using the rude words. Logo embroidery design on socks and mittens turned out to be a real nightmare for me. I tried to fit the free arm into these items in the presence of a client, hoping to use the pocket frame.
At first, the client wanted me to embroider a nickname inside a filled rectangle. But having tried the mitten on, it dawned on me that it was hardly possible to embroider a full-fledged design on it, even if it did not contain many thousand stitches. So I suggested embroidering the text on a piece of cloth first and then sewing it onto the mittens.
This is the place where the client wanted the embroidery initially, and that turned out to be impossible, because of the inability to fit a pocket frame into a mitten up to the required point:
In the end we came to this arrangement:
It would be an understatement to say that it was difficult to fit a free arm into a hooped canvas mitten with a polyester padding — it fitted to a T and did not move at all:
I even had to remove the machine's protection cover in order to turn the mitten around somehow. I also had to stick a paper adhesive to all the movable part just in case:
In the end the mitten just barely turned around the arm. I had to help it with one hand, turning the mitten so as to follow the cap frame and slow down the embroidery speed holding the start button with the other in order for embroidery speed not to exceed 120 rpm. Even me helping the machine to turn the mitten around didn't keep the embroidery from shifting, so I had to take it off, remove the embroidery and start it all over. All this just for one stitch!
Eventually I managed to embroider all these mittens and the socks that followed or rather to sew the embroidery onto them, but it took me all day to do this.
I embroidered the socks using the pocket frame, too, and it turned out to be much easier for they were made of knitwear:
But the design was a standard one, not just plain stitching, and it was not so enjoyable either, for the pocket frame is too loose and the result was visibly pulled, and this despite me having stretched the socks to the limit in order to fit the arm into them:
Here is the result of my 'kitchen-table effort'. This is the instructive example of what one should not do, regarding the existing limits.
Gloves and mittens are in trend again this season. But by now I've become smarter and decided to buy a special hoop for this kind of embroidery, although there is no such thing for Velles. About the hoop I eventually bought and how much did it cost me, I'll better tell in a separate article, because, in my opinion, it's an interesting story, too.
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