My daughter Julie asked me to make Casey – my one year old grand-daugher – a dressing gown. We are just about to go into Winter here in New Zealand and it’s getting a little on the cold side at nights. The boys, Ben and Henry, already have their dressing gowns which I made them last year so Casey was the only one without a dressing gown. I got out some pink polar fleece that I had in my stash (it’s always good to get some of the “stash” down a little!) and used a dressing gown pattern that I traced from my Ottobre books.

Julie asked me to make the dressing gown a little shorter than normal as Casey has only been walking for two months and she didn’t want it long enough to hinder her. Julie also asked me to place an embroidery on the pocket. I said that was fine. But then she asked me to put one of the Kokeshi Dolls on the pocket. This is a set that I bought about 9 months ago and used on the headings of Casey’s sheets last year. They are a set of dolls from John Deer. Very cute but quite a few color changes – especially when you’re in hurry. And when am I not in a hurry???

I decided that to cut out a few of the color changes I would take the design into Embird Editor and do some editing.

I removed the shading on the left by finding the color and right mouse clicking on it in the Color Box and choosing Delete. Gone…..Yeah, one color less…..Then I adjusted some of the other colors by combining them. I separated all the colors, changed the ones that I wanted to duplicate and then re-arranged the sewing order so that similar colors were joined. I checked the result out in 3D to make sure that nothing was stitching in the wrong order as well.

Just a wee note here – if your colors that are identical and are placed side by side don’t merge into one then you need to make sure that you have “Join Consecutive Colors” selected in the Options Menu.

All in all this took me just a few minutes but saved me quite some time at the machine. The designs are quite small (about 3inches by 2 inches) but quite stitch intense so removing some shading stitches has very little effect on the final outcome. You won’t notice the changes.

While my embroidery machine was embroidering on the pocket I was sewing as much of the dressing gown as I could before needing that pocket. Actually it took me almost the same amount of time to sew 80% of the dressing gown as it did to embroider the doll. Here is the result on the model after she has had her bath and is ready for bed. Not the best photo as I am sure Julie didn’t know that it was going to end up on my blog. If I can get another photo I will post it here…

She looks very cute but next time I think I would like the dressing gown a little longer but Julie is very happy with it and it certainly keeps Casey warm.

I have not forgotten my other grandson as well. I have just finished making him a pile of winter clothes. I will put photos up in my next post – but there is no embroidery on his clothes. So maybe they won’t be as interesting to you. But they are very cute outfits……

On an Embird note – and re the next expected version of Embird – I haven’t heard a thing about when the expected release date is. The next version is supposed to be fully integrated with Windows 7. It was expected to be released earlier this year but hasn’t appeared yet. Embird are often later with releasing an update than they say – as is what happens with software programs in general. But as it is so late and also that Windows 8 is on the horizon I am wondering if the delay has anything to do with Windows 8 being released. This is just me speculating though. I could be very wrong. Like as not, as soon as I publish this post Embird will release their latest update and prove me entirely wrong. LOL!!!

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