Meet Thread Astaire, my tough, hard-working, embroidery machine. He spends his days and nights tapping away, stitching out, beautiful embroidery designs. It’s hard to believe, but this behemoth of a machine was nearly taken out by something as delicate as feathers.
These were no ordinary feathers though, they were feathers stitched out using a technique called freestanding lace (fsl). Whereas most machine embroidery designs are intended to be stitched out onto a fabric of some kind, fsl designs are made to be stitched onto a water soluble stabilizer so that when the stitch out is complete, the stabilizer can be dissolved and you’re left with a freestanding design. By its nature, these designs are thread heavy, because the thread has to interlock as it is the only thing holding the design together.
While stitching the feathers, I ran into an issue where I had not properly routed the thread. I didn’t realize it until the thread stopped spooling causing the machine to screech to a halt. I think this may have been the point where my problems started. The issues included so much thread shredding and so many broken needles. Every time I thought I’d fixed the problems, I’d find that I was incorrect. I don’t remember the exact number of feathers I tried to stitch out, but I do know that I attempted at least a dozen of the blue jay feathers and in the end, only 4 were successful.
The near fatal blow was delivered when a needle broke off of the machine and embedded itself into the feather stitch out. It was stuck to the point that I was unable to dislodge it and had to have my husband pull it out when he got home from work.
The next day, I started up the machine only to discover that it was locked up. I kept getting an error message and couldn’t do a single thing except cry. Okay, I didn’t actually cry, but I did feel sad and disappointed that everything had to be put on hold until I could get a diagnosis and hopefully a fix for Thread Astaire. Thankfully, I am married to a mechanical genius and I knew my diagnostician in shining armor would be home soon. Though, due to some long and busy work days, it was a few days before my husband could take a look at the machine. But once he was able to give it his attention he performed some kind of miracle work and got Thread Astaire up and running again!! Unfortunately, even after he’d been fixed, I was still running into thread shredding issues and had to supervise the rest of the stitch outs. I think/hope that the thread issues were due to a burr in the needle plate. I have since replaced the needle plate and hopefully 
fixed that problem.
The blue jay feathers included a part of the design that was intended to be stitched with a metallic thread. I used an iridescent thread and it gave a beautiful bit of shimmer to the feather. I wanted to add some of that same shimmer to the desert sunrise feathers, but my attempts were unsuccessful. That was okay though, since the feathers look pretty good without the added shimmer. Out of the multiple feathers I tried to stitch, I ended up with 4 blue jay feathers. 1 was made for Bunny1kenobi (hers was supposed to look like a blue jay feather and though the design is the same, the colors are different. When I got to step 3 in the stitch out, I accidentally loaded the color for step 4 and ended up changing the rest of the thread colors as a result), 2 were donated to the LettuceCraft garage sale and I kept 1 for myself. Of the 5 desert sunrise feathers that I managed to fully stitch out, 2 were donated, 2 were failed shimmer thread attempts, and one was an okay shimmer thread attempt.
I ran into so many issues during my many attempts to stitch out these feathers. For both mine and Thread Astaire’s sake, it will definitely be a long while before I even think of trying this again! 
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I also stitched out some coordinating cards to send with the feathers.
I did a whole bunch of butterflies for my kid’s birthday back in the day (hm, possibly I should re-post that project…) and haven’t stitched anything that heavy since.
