Ouch!

It's going to be nice, but cold, at the Fest this weekend.  Having my cloak is going to be important, and I did the template for the backplate of the cloak pins yesterday.  I will drill and saw today and Friday morning, set the rivets and the pins will be ready to go.  That leaves the cloak itself. 

No, my machine is more modern than this one.  But
this is pretty cool, isn't it?

I am not happy with the hand-embroidery that I have done up to this point.  So I decided to try out the machine embroidery features of my sewing machine.  My machine is old, but it can satin stitch, and that's really all I was looking for.  I tried several different methods and threads, ended up having to run out to the fabric store to get thread that I liked, and continued experimenting.  While doing that, since the embroidery part for the type of stitch I was doing requires the pressure foot to be removed from the needle leaving a naked needle, I ended up with a serious oops.  The naked needle impaled my finger.  Ouch!  Everyone who has a sewing machine has sewed through their finger at some point - usually when they are children.  I am here to tell you that it still hurts when you are an adult.  I was "one with the machine" for a bit - the needle wouldn't retract because it bent when it impaled me.  But I manually retracted the needle after a couple of futile tries using the foot pedal.  I cleaned it up, put on a bandage, and went back to the machine with a new needle.  Results?  Well, it will take more practice before I am happy with my skill levels on this but it might give me the look that I need.  Next week I don't get a studio day so I can't play, but in the meanwhile I will take out the embroidery that I don't like and wash the cloak.  That should get rid of the marked designs that I was using.  I can reapply them easily when I am ready to try the embroidery again.  In the meanwhile, I will at least have a useable cloak this weekend.