When disaster strikes, not once, not twice, not three times, but four times!

Oh...I had such great plans for today(and thankfully the day is not yet over)! Since I had a bunch of computer work caught up yesterday, today my plan was to sew and embroider all day! Exciting, yes I know! Until the first disaster struck...

I hooped my stabilizer, noticing slightly that my hoop screw was starting get stripped and my stabilizer was not as quite as taunt as I like it, but deciding it would be ok to stitch one more design. I stuck my fabric down and started stitching my rose design.

The first couple of thread colors stitched and I noticed more puckers than normal in the fabric. I smoothed down the fabric eliminating a few puckers, saying to myself that it will be ok and I can press out those puckers that are there.

I'm on the 9th color and there are more and more puckers and ripples in the fabric. I'm now thinking, "It will be ok. I just have to make it to the end of this design." Here's a glimpse of the puckers and they are 10 times worse seeing the actual fabric verses a photo.

With each stitch the machine is taking, the inner hoop is getting looser and looser inside the outer hoop. I know what could happen and keep hoping it won't: the inner hoop popping out of the outer hoop right in the middle of stitching!

Just completely ignore the fact that my sticky, dirty hoop
is in desperate need of cleaning. I can't believe
I'm actually posting this photo!

I'm keeping an eye on it, checking it every few minutes and finally breath a sigh of relief when it's on the final color. The last color outline starts on one rose and as it moves to the opposite end of the hoop it happens...

...the inner hoop slides right out of the outer hoop and the machine just keeps on stitching...

I should interject at this point and mention that this is the 9th design on this one panel of fabric that it has a total of 10 designs, so I'm almost done. And each design has over 30,000 stitches and takes over an hour to stitch. Ummm....there is no way I want to start over with this piece of fabric....

As soon as I saw it, I stopped the machine and knew at this point, it was not going to be ok. I had to do something. Ever so carefully I shoved the inner hoop with stabilizer/fabric back into the outer hoop ring, hoping it would somehow, be somewhat close to where it should be.

See where is started stitching before I
snapped the fabric back into place?

Thankfully the last color is shading so the slight movement of the fabric would never be noticed. If it were an outline, I would be in trouble. And thankfully I caught it before the machine had stitched too much to the fabric without actually being attached to the hoop.

Puckers galore to press out of the fabric! See the puckers on the front and back? Your design should never look like this if the hoop is correctly tightened!

I was more than relieved to finally have the design finished, but knew some massive pressing would be needed to get the fabric to lay flat with all those puckers. As I started pressing, I soon discovered that I hadn't cleaned my iron from my last project and now I not only have puckers in my panel of fabric, but also little brown marks - disaster #2.

Having pressed the puckers and taken care of the brown marks, I decided that the worst was over and I could stitch the 10th and final design on this panel. I changed my hoop nut which was stripped and keeping the hoop from tightening as it should, hooped my stabilizer, stuck on my fabric and started stitching.

Oh...so much better without all those puckers forming with every stitch! The worst part of the day is over - hooray! Until I get to the 9th color and realize that I stitched the 8th color with the wrong color of thread - disaster #3. To make matters worse, I had already done that once earlier in the week.

Taking the hoop out of the machine, I ripped the tiny little step stitches of color 8 and started stitching that same color with the correct color of thread. I moved onto color 9 and disaster #4 strikes. With less than 1 minute left and only a small space yet to stitch, I run out of thread.

And the really sad part is that if I would have stitched color 8 with the correct color of thread in the first place instead of the thread for color 9, I would have enough thread! That's the really disastrous part!

I hope, really hope, that there is not disaster #5 lurking about somewhere in the rest of the day.

So now that you've heard about my wonderful, disaster-filled morning, how was yours? Hopefully your day of stitching was not quite as eventful as mine! :)