I hope everyone had a nice Labor Day Weekend. I spent the weekend working on a project that is near and dear to my heart. My Brother works at Portland Golf Course. About 6 weeks ago, he reached out to me to see if I could embroider Golf Tee Flags for the Hospice Golf Tournament scheduled for September 10. This timing for this little project made it extra special for me because our Mom is currently receiving Hospice Care. I remember (many years ago) when my Grandmother had cancer, she was in hospice care for the last two weeks of her life. That experience gave me the impression that hospice care was for end of life. Boy, was I wrong, It’s not about giving up, it’s about letting others step in to help you live each day to the fullest… and it’s been a God-Send to our family.
So, of course I said “YES”, I can embroider the tee flag for you! First up, Middlesex Health partnered with Portland Golf Course… so I digitized their logo to embroider on each flag. To get a jump on the project, I started embroidering the logo design on pieces of cotton fusible interfacing. My thought was I could do all the embroidery on the interfacing …then fuse it onto the flag so the bobbin threads would not be as visible on the back side of the flag.
Did I test my theory?? Nope, I just embroidered by heart out while I was waiting for the sponsor names to come to me. When I finally got the list of sponsors, I picked the shortest name and embroidered it on the interfacing. Then I tried fusing it to the flag. All I can say about that is that it came out yucky… there were lots of wrinkles around the design where the glue did not adhere to the flag. (Sorry for the blurry photo… buy you can see what I mean about wrinkles.)
So, I had to embroider directly on the flag… Silly me, it was so much easier! The fabric the flags were made from was very stiff and stable. I’m not a fan of hooping the fabric. Usually, I hoop stabilizer and then position the fabric on the stabilizer and baste in the hoop. I couldn’t do that for this project because there’s a plastic tube sewn to the end of each flag. It got in the way when the flag was laying on top of the hoop. It turns out hooping these flags was easy. I folded the flag in half so I could position the logo in the center of the flag. I worked production style… embroidering all the logos before I started on the sponsor names.
To position the sponsor names under the logo, I made note of the full length of the embroidery and then marked the start point. I did not want to mark up these white flags… Scotch Tape to the rescue. After lightly drawing a horizontal guide line, I put a little piece of tape at the end and used a pen to draw a bracket to position the first letter of the sponsor name.
While embroidering the logs in the center of the flag was a snap… embroidering the sponsor names presented a new problem. The little plastic tube would not allow me to hoop the flag close enough to the left edge of the flag to fit the longer sponsor names. What to do?? Rotate the design vertically and hoop the fabric so that the plastic tube is running along the bottom edge of the hoop (instead of next to the bracket where the hoop attaches to the machine.
Here’s what the flag looks like hooped and attached to my Brother PRS 100. I LOVE this embroidery machine… At first I thought it was going to be annoying to embroider long names because the largest hoop is only 8″ square. It turns out that positioning and repositioning the flag in the hoop was a snap. You can choose the location around the edge of the design that will be the guide to position it precisely. I chose the upper left hand corner of each part of the sponsor name to get it in just the right spot!
To see where this position is, there is a little red dot that beams down onto the surface of the fabric in the hoop. I used the directional arrows to move the red dot right on top of bracket I marked on the Scotch tape. Then I used the trace feature to make sure the design was going to stitch out properly before pressing GO!
You can see here that the first letter of this sponsor is aligned perfectly!
Then I stopped the machine so I could peel of the tape before finishing the embroidery.
To get “Garden” to line up properly, I used the same Scotch tape method to mark the upper left hand corner of the “G”. Because I donated my time to embroider these flags, I was asked to make a flag for J Stern Designs and Carol’s Garden.
Have you heard of Carol’s Garden?? You can check it out right here! And our private Facebook page group here. My sister and I started this non-profit in honor of our Mom, Carol. If you knit or crochet and you’d like to join us. We knit shawls as well as receive beautiful donated shawls and lap blankets. Then we plan events at local memory care places to deliver these beauties to the residents. A little cozy comfort goes a long way! Each person gets to pick out the shawl that catches their eye. Having something “to do” always makes me feel better about what’s happening to our Mom & Family & I know my sister, Joanna, feels the same way. We could not make deliveries without all of the donations we receive every week. If you’ve sent us a shawl… Thank you so much, we super appreciate all your time and talent!
