So I've picked myself up, dusted myself off... and after my spooktacular failure at getting an early start on Feeling Stitchy's September Stitch-A-Long, I've had to start again. (Halloween theme... spooktacular...see what I did there?)  Originally I wanted to stitch the design onto black cloth, but after the fail with aida, I ordered some black cotton online, ....and the sellers let me down and didn't ship it out yet.  Clearly I'm doomed to failure.  But heck, I'm chomping at the bit so I decided to use a pillow case that I already had on hand and just get going.  This will also help to reduce some of the growing mountain of embroidery supplies that I am amassing. I'm using a pale yellow linen pillowcase.  I know.  Not a very Halloween-y colour, right?  Yeah, well - tough.  I figured the ghostly white and bright orange colours would at least show up (as opposed to on a while background) and well... you know, sometimes you just have to be a solider and get on with the tools that you have.

So I retraced the lovely design (by Cathy Gaubert) onto my pillowcase using red tracing paper.  Nice huh?  That purple mark, by the way, is the centre of the case - I used one of those disappearing "trick markers" to do it.  Do they really disappear after 24 hours?  I'm wondering.  I did some colouring on the inside seams of my case so I guess I'll find out soon enough.

I decided to do the ghost's outline in a grey chain stitch and embellish it with white thread.  So far so good.  Then at the last minute I decided to get all fancy-pants and use some of the DMC pearlescent effects thread that is so sexy looking.

Boy oh boy. I had heard that rayon threads were hard to work with - well, understatement!  Okay so I struggled for like 2 hours (yes 2 hours ladies and gentlemen) to get the damn sparkly-ass threads onto the fabric, but I also learned a few things.  Such as - my chain stitch was too tight (4 strands and small stitches) -- not a lot of room for the decoration thread on top of that.  Such as - those (supposedly) six strand metallic threads are really made up of bundles of smaller threads which just fray all to hell when you pull them through the fabric several times.  And they are brittle, crimping up if you use a needle threader and breaking really easily.  Sigh.  Okay so I learned.  Next time, I whip instead of back-stitching my spectacular metallic embellishments. Ha!

You will also notice that all of my tracing has been pretty well rubbed right off the fabric already.  That's from all the blood and sweat and anxious crumpling that it endured during my Great Sparkly Chain Stitch Debacle.

I wonder if anyone else cusses as much as I do when they do embroidery?