I hate "learning experiences"...

I spent this past weekend kid-free up with my girls in Atlantic City for a bachelorette party (and I'm still recovering if you want to know the truth). To say we had a blast would be an understatement. So anyway, being the "crafty-wanna-be" that I am, I decided she needed some fun shirts. Since I have an embroidery machine I said, "I'm going to embroider her a tank top that says 'bachelorette'". Easy enough, right? So I run to target and get the tank top and I get to my computer to set up the text.

I went with the Tinkertoy font; a font that I got for free and digitized myself using my 5D Embroidery Software. As I've said before, I am a novice at both embroidering and especially digitizing, but I thought I was pretty good at digitizing fonts. I mean, it's pretty simple. Click the "new font" button and follow the steps. So I create the project file on the computer with my Tinkertoy font about 1 inch tall, and head over to my mother-in-laws house (which is where the machine lives).

I get the girls upstairs, situated and I get started embroidering. About 10 minutes in I take a look and I realize that I'm only only like the 'c' (of Bachelorette)... which means this is taking FOR.EV.ER. Also, it looks like the shirt is kind of being pulled from back. But overall it didn't look too bad:

It wasn't until I was done embroidering the shirt and it was un-hooped that I saw how THICK the stitches were on the back.

I mean they are REALLY thick; thicker on the back than on the front... which is just wrong.

So I take it into 'my embroidery store' (aka the sewing place we bought it from and where I take all of my "what in the world did I do wrong" questions). So I walk in and say, "Ok... what in the world did I do wrong here? Is it the wrong kind of shirt?". No. It was operator error.

When digitizing, I always forget that the LOWER the Satin Density, the closer together the stitches are and the thicker they are. And since I apparently had a density of 5, and I used smaller letters, voila... REALLY thick stitches. (In my mind lower density means less dense.... not so much).

So 2 lessons learned here:
First - Always check the density... and it's always BACKWARDS of what I think.
And Second (something they tell me to do everytime I go in there with a screw up) always do a test run.... which I HATE to do. I only have so much time at my mother-in-laws with the kids happy, I don't want to waste my precious time on a practice run. Bleh.

I also did another tank top using iron on letters (which I LOVE)... she's the youngest of us 3 musketeers... so thus the 2nd shirt:

Linking up: A Bowl full of Lemons, Homework