A New Fish Joins The School

I've been experimenting with creating stuffed fish for children's toys.  I decided it was time to add another fish to the collection.

This fish is a Regal Angelfish, another colorful Indo-pacific species.

The process begins with a photograph, again one of my own.

Using Floriani Total Control embroidery design software, I'm able to define lines and regions from the photograph and then figure out how to embroider them.  Since the fish is more orange than any other color, I'm starting with plain orange fabric.

Once the embroidery design is complete, I end up with a file like this:




Now all that remains is to sew it out.  Easier said than done.

 Things went wrong on this attempt.  The hoop hit a wall and the sewing machine lost track of exactly where it was at.    The registration of the various pieces is now wrong, since the yellow ring is supposed to go around the black circle of the eye.  There's no fixing this, it's a do-over, after moving the machine farther from the wall!

This attempt looks better, but a closer look reveals new issues.

When the design was scaled up from the size of the photograph to the size desired for sewing, the white stripes and black edges acquired some distance between them.

If you didn't know this fish, you might not think this was a problem, but I'm a stickler for my fish.  This problem had to be fixed with quite a bit of work back in the design software.

Finally, all the pieces came together and I produced a good fish and it's mirror reverse, for the opposite side.

I just sew these together, stuff them, and there's a good toy for a baby.  It's 100% washable, with nothing to fall off and get swallowed.  Lots of kids get Teddy Bears, but how many end up with a very realistic stuffed fish?  Only a few.

Come back next week for a new home decorating project.

This blog has been on hiatus while I dealt with moving to a new house.  it will continue weekly in the future.

Sunshade for a Robot

You might be wondering just which planet this post applies to.  I assure you that it's planet Earth.

I've decided that mowing a lawn in the hot Alabama sun and humidity isn't something I need to be doing.  Most people would just hire a lawn service, but I decided to try out a different approach -- an autonomous mower, basically a grass cutting robot. The effectiveness of the mower depends on where it's charging station is placed, particularly if you want it to mow both the front and back of the house.  For a lot of reasons, the back of the house was the right place to put the mower.   However, the battery lasts a lot longer if it's not hot when it's charged.  That means it's idea to put the charging station out of the sun.  The west side of the house is very much in the full sun.  I decided that the best solution was to make a sunshade for the charging station and mower, so that it would be out of the sun while charging.

 Here's the mower and charging station before the sunshade:

The mower is only 12" tall, so the shade doesn't have to be very high.  In fact, it's better than it's not, so that the view out the windows isn't obstructed.   However, the mower needs unobstructed access to the charging station from the sides, so the supports for the shade can't be next to the station.  One way to solve this problem is to make a very long shade, but it doesn't have to be all that wide.

I found this nice fabric at Wal-Mart.

It's a polyester canvas with a urethane backing.  That means it will be very sturdy, very light proof and even water proof.  Being water proof isn't a necessity for this application, but it's a nice bonus.  The fabric is 60" wide, so 3 sections sewn side by side gives me plenty of width to the sunshade.  The light khaki color will help keep the area under the shade cool.

I made flatfeld seams to help wit making it water proof.  There's a bunch of ways to hold the fabric in place while it is stitched, but I didn't have any nice seam tape.

Blue painter's tape did just fine.  It's not what I would recommend for fine sewing, but that's not what this is. 

I added a 1" hem and grommets at the corners.  Since the fabric won't ravel with the urethane backing, I just turned under the hem once.

Here's the mower hanging out in it's cool, shady charging station.

Come back next week for some other crazy fun adventure with a sewing machine.