Kicking myself

I have been kicking myself for not mounting the strawberries gauze on muslin in a hoop earlier.  Stitching life has been SO much easier since I did.

I sewed the gauze to a piece of muslin that was tautly mounted in the hoop, then cut away the muslin behind the areas that need to be stitched, and got the third strawberry piece worked. You can't see from my craptastic photo, but my stitching is much more even.

For a brief moment I thought about restitching the two red berries. Then I decided that the surface of a real strawberry is not smooth, so I'm leaving them alone.

It was so worth the time it took to mount it this way. If I sound giddy--well, it doesn't take much to make my little needlework world happy.

Dearly Beloved, who was watching me hand stitch the gauze to muslin asked why I didn't slap it on the sewing machine. What took an hour, said he, would just take a minute or two on the machine.

Au contraire.

To do that, I would have had to:

• clear off the end of the kitchen or dining room table--Dearly Beloved is currently purging files and has piles of stuff on both.
• haul the sewing machine out of the closet and hoist it to the top of the table. It's portable only in that there is a handle on the top of its case.
• load a bobbin. That is, after I found my extra supply of bobbins, which I carefully put away and can't remember where I put them.  (Should I admit that I have bought more bobbins--twice--to replace the ones I can't find? And now I can't find the replacements either?)
• thread the machine
• decide which zigzag I want to use
• get the gauze positioned and pinned
• sew it on the muslin without sewing myself

It would have taken the same amount of time that hand sewing did.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.