Ornaments

A few days ago, I had an email from Thelander Designs — a perfectly ordinary email to advertise a sale on some of their embroidery designs. A quick glance and I’ll trash it, right? Oops. There was a design for an ornament for firefighters, and I just had to get it, since one of our grandsons is a firefighter. Of course!

But then it mushroomed. Since I was going to make this for him, why not make more of them for his squad? There couldn’t be more than half a dozen squad members, right? So I decided that I could streamline the process by making three of them more or less at once by using a bigger hoop, and I texted our grandson to get an exact number of people on his squad, without telling him why. I suspect he thinks I’m baking something for them.

And that’s where things mushroomed again. There are eleven members of his squad! The result is that I made three ornaments at a time (four times!) for two days. Each ornament has 10.6K stitches. Making them in multiples doesn’t change that, but it does minimize how many times I have to change the thread color, since each color stitches on all three ornaments, one after the other, before I have to change thread colors again. I ended up with twelve ornaments by doing it this way, so I’m keeping one. So there. 😉 I’ll deliver the others as soon as our grandson returns from a brief trip.