More Coffee Please

I’m terribly bored with this election — lots of pointless hot-air and genital-waving — so instead of involving myself in it, reading every word out of every politician’s machine and listening to the debates, I embarked on a bit of needlework. A far surer path to ongoing sanity, I think. (I will vote, of course. I always vote. And I always inform myself about the issues. But there seems to be little of import being waved about just now, despite many potential issues of import which might be good to raise.)

I was testing out a new pattern-transfer paper (Transfer-Eze), which I was hoping would simplify the matter of getting detailed/complex patterns onto the material to be embroidered. Wax transfer paper, pencils and the like are fine for most things, but I’d been stymied by my Green Man pattern and I thought it would be a good one to use to test the new paper, which promised that I could print right on it and stick it to my work and wash it out afterward. Would my printer work with it? Would the markings stay intact through the whole process? Would the paper wash out properly afterward? Would the project last long enough to distract me from both English and French debates? The happy answer to all these questions is an unqualified Yes, and I can definitely recommend the product.

So here’s my election-avoiding Green Man, embroidered on the front end of a heavy-duty canvas newspaper bag like this one (I also recommend reuseit.com — I’ve ordered from them a number of times):

At the beginning. I wanted to see how the transferred lines held up throughout the process.

Even halfway through they weren’t deteriorating much, even though I had my fingers all over them all the time and I moved the hoop a half-dozen times.

And the end result, before I washed out the paper — it looked identical afterward:

So there we have it. A Green Man. Which, I suppose, is as good a political statement as any about who I might vote for.