fantastic

[dragonlady7]

I'm having a great technology... week. Last night I was trying to machine-embroider something real quick on a bag I was making my niece, and instead of being a quick step on the way to making the thing, the machine-embroidery took two hours, broke three needles, and somehow wound up distorting itself so the last three thread colors weren't lined up with the first ones, so I had to stop it with two colors remaining and it'll just... go without those elements. There's no way to realign it. So the bag isn't made yet, because that took me all night.
So I'm not ready to take the package to work, so I won't drive today, so i should move my car out of the way so Dude can drive his car to work.
I went out as soon as I woke up, to move my car, and... my car won't start. The starter coughed about three times, didn't catch, I tried it again, it turned over once, now it doesn't respond when I turn the key. Mother fucker.

I was going to write more but my severely-neglected cat just came and stole my whole left arm, so at least I have that going for me.

Comments

[unicornduke]

Sounds like you're having a hell of a day.

For the embroidery machine, do you set it to go and then it just does it's thing if it's working correctly? And you just hang out and watch it?

[dragonlady7]

Ostensibly. Well, you hang out and change threads every so often.
In reality, you have to sit there and watch it and rethread it every time the thread breaks, which with regular embroidery floss is every so often, and with metallic embroidery floss is fucking constantly, and often you'll notice significantly before the machine does that there's a problem. If the thread snags, it can bend the needle, which then SNAPS DRAMATICALLY, so I usually sit there holding the thread between my fingers to make sure it doesn't snag, which isn't actually enough but prolongs the interval between the thread breaking by a few stitches generally. Last night after changing the needle three times I noticed the machine's noise changing and instantly stopped it, to discover that the needle had actually freed itself entirely and fallen out of the needle holder.
tl;dr it's a HUGE pain in the ass, and while it's yes much faster than hand-embroidering, you still have to sit there and monitor every fucking stitch, and if it comes out badly, you have to throw the whole work away because there's no goddamn way you can unpick ten thousand stitches and have the fabric still look like anything afterward.

[unicornduke]

Sounds like a bigger pain than a regular sewing machine, which I didn't think was possible

[dragonlady7]

It's not that it's more of a pain, per se-- it IS just a regular sewing machine, with a computer-controlled platform attached and a special foot you can put on. But you can remove both of those and then it's just a sewing machine.

What makes it a huge pain is that it's doing something a regular machine can't, so.

The ones that can more or less run unattended are #1 dedicated machines that ONLY do embroidery, #2 have several needles so you can load up all the colors of thread at once, and #3 are thousands upon thousands of dollars. I've never seen them but Dude used to do contract work for New Era Cap, so he got to see their industrial ballcap embroidery facility. (Which! they are shutting down and offshoring! so! that sucks!)