Hand Jive

After my glorious end-of-summer weekend in Tofino I came home determined to tackle the digit defining stitches on the bat hands.

This is a task on which I’ve been procrastinating for a while.

In the beginning I had a decent reason for postponing – I needed to source some finer gauge thread (the thread I use for my “regular” sized, 22″ figures is fine for sewing, but too wiry for the long, uncut threads to fall nicely on the half-sized figures).

A SMALL CHALLENGE

Appropriate thread aside, I was reluctant to start for other reasons, one being that the hands are so, well…wee.  They are super tiny and that makes for some challenging machine embroidery.  The stitch lines are taken extremely close to the edges of the pieces and there’s not much fabric for the feed dog to grab on to.

[for those of you who are sewing averse, “feed dog” is what the textured plate below the presser foot is called.  It pops up ever-so-slightly, grabs the fabric, and moves it forward through the machine as the needle goes up and down]

Thankfully my fears were for naught.

My first completed hand proved I would have no problems (though if I’d made the hands any smaller, I’d be hand embroidering the stitch lines on 4,000 hands…yikes!).

AN EYE OPENING CHALLENGE

I embroider by eye.

Each hand is a slightly different width and as I pick one up I quickly judge the width and mentally calculate where the stitch lines will need to go to make 4 relatively equal digits.  Because the hands are small, there is little room for error.

I’ve stitched 120 hands in just under 4 hours, which puts my initial rate at around 30pph.

I’ll most likely speed up as I get into the groove with my sewing mojo – I estimate another 125 hrs will be needed to complete the remaining hands.

This brings us to the third challenge.

AN ERGO CHALLENGE

Raising my sewing machine up to eye level is brilliant for being able to see what I’m doing, but working with my shoulders up around my ears is not so great.  As with other repetitive tasks, I’m finding that hand jiving for no more than an hour and then switching to another task is keeping the tension headaches at bay.

This part of the process is hands-down the most labour intensive (yes, the pun was necessary.  Be thankful I used restraint and didn’t title the post how I actually wanted to).  At this point I almost have enough body components to assemble 30 figures (just need some arms!), so I may start dividing my day between hands and assembly.

It will be amazing to finally see some complete bodies after 8 months of work!

Working on a long-term project?  What upcoming milestone are you looking forward to reaching?