The kiddo was bored at a school in-person testing day (he's still doing remote school, so he doesn't have many chances to be bored at school) and drew a very sarcastic picture of Puyo Puyo Carbuncle. I thought the drawing was fantastic so recently copied it onto freezer paper to make a stencil...which ended up not sticking well to this Walmart mill-end precut synthetic fabric, so my copy ended up with Issues. I did consider adding more decoration to obscure it, but decided not to over-complicate things.
I turned to the Puyo Nexus Wiki to reference how to write the various forms of "goo" that Carbuncle says, drew the hiragana really fast, and made another freezer paper stencil...which I tried tacking on with masking tape. The masking tape stuck fine to the slick back of the freezer paper, but not to the fabric, so I ended up holding the paper down with various paint pots. I did a base layer of white paint for both, and used fabric medium, and still made a mess. The kiddo thinks it's funny, and that's all that matters.
The pattern is Kwik Sew 1650, with the ribbing omitted from the cuffs and waistband. No reason beyond aesthetic.
Multicolored stripes knit for the neckband, and I didn't worry about getting the stripes aligned perfectly because that way lies madness.
Neckband seam slightly offset behind the left shoulder seam as usual.
I used the magnetic seam gauge to fold and stitch the sleeve and waist hems without pressing, sewing everything twice to simulate the look of a cover stitch.
When I pressed the paint (through parchment paper), I tried to avoid the smudge of white paint by the one ear, in hope that not heat setting it will encourage it to wash out. I have already tried removing it with acetone, but there's a big blob of it on the back that keeps soaking back through whenever it gets softened, and I don't want to work from the back because then I might end up making more of a mess on the front. Not, of course, that any of the other paint applications are without fault.
I installed the left needle on my serger and used the serger to do the basic construction, and that left needle managed to last until just after I did the last planned serger stitch before it broke. This led to finally trying to figure out what was causing the problems with the left needle, and how I was pretty much breaking one left needle on every project since I decided to finally start adding a left needle, for construction stitches, last month...after owning the serger for over 30 years and using only a single needle, for edge finishing, that entire time. (And, yes, only ever using the kind of needle demanded by the sticker on the serger.)
I looked up videos about adjusting timing and eventually determined that it was not a timing problem. I poked and prodded and removed parts to get a good look at what was happening while the chains were forming and managed to break another needle while testing but not sewing anything. I eventually noticed that there were a lot of raw metal nicks on a small bit of metal, so I tool pictures and shared them on a Discord where I knew people knew my level of sewing/machine experience, and so wouldn't offer well-meaning but useless advice. A Discord friend eventually identified the metal part as the stationary needle guard. When I took it off, I saw that it was ever so slightly adjustable--and also that the needles had been in contact with the back of it enough to wear off the finish--so I put it back, positioned forward as much as possible.
I have not tried sewing anything but single needle chains with it since then, and I still have absolutely no idea what was happening to cause the needle(s) to deflect forward enough to land square on the top of the guard (and that then causing the needle to break), so I don't know if that will solve anything. It was getting late and I was tired and didn't trust my judgement, and that interlude made this project take way longer to complete than it should have.
But, hey, it is complete! ぐっぐー!
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