The Home Stretch

I'm heading into the home stretch of the fish and I can feel gumption traps all around me. I can feel this manic voice in my head telling me to power through, pull and all-nighter, and just finish-finish-finish no matter what the cost. Except I know that if I do that, if I rush through these last bits, then I'm going to burn out. Especially considering the most frustrating part of the fish is coming up!

Notice anything about the two fins? Maybe that they're two different shades of gray? Yeah. Welcome to how my brain doesn't always work all that well. You see, when I first started sewing Mr. Fish I did the outline first. I didn't know any filling stitches so I didn't want to jump into that right away, which left the fins and the spots. This fish being my first time trying to sew something which looked like a picture I wanted to work the fin first, to get the perspective of the ridges by using gray and white heavy chain stitch. Wait! An obstacle! There's no gray thread on my dinky little island!

I stood there, staring at the whopping twenty different colors of floss. Maybe I could do the ridges in white and light blue? No, that would look really weird. But wait! What's that over there? It's a bird.. a plane.. it's special Japanese hand-sewing thread in silver! Silver is like gray! I can make this work, because I am a problem solver!

I promptly went home and cut 6 lengths of hand-sewing thread (手縫い糸), knotted them together, and spent ten minutes trying to get all six of them threaded through the needle. In retrospect that should have been a warning sign. I eventually got it all threaded through, made the first stitch and-

KNOT.

Ten minutes untangling the knot.

Lather, rinse, repeat ad naseum.



But in the end I triumphed! I was able to wrestle the horrible hand-sewing thread into submission, and while it wasn't perfect it was at least it was passable. I settled in to bask in my resourcefulness, content that I had overcome a major stumbling block.

 Needless to say, I wasn't happy. I went to SATY, and as expected, piles if gray, but none that actually matched the thread I'd already used. I bought some anyway just in case the different shades wouldn't be too obvious. I started sewing with it and at first it seemed like it might work! It's still kind of silvery. It's going to be ok!

Yeah, I was just fooling myself. They're markedly different. But you know what? I think it can work. I'll work the tail in two separate colors and if anyone asks I'll tell them that it's supposed to be shadow versus light. The sun is shining on the fish's left side, which means the colors will be brighter. Yes. Not because I couldn't wait until I had decent thread, mm-mmmmm.



*cough*