July felt like a month where we really were demonstrating our cumulative learning. I gave myself grace for July. I started the month – July 1 with an emergency room trip. By Sunday, July 3, I went into surgery for an unexpected/anticipated ‘pacemaker’! I just finished myt 6 week mark.

I decided to focus on ‘Christmas’ for this project because I believe in eternal, love, joy, hope, and peace. My goal is to make this design a medallion center surrounded by 12 blocks reflecting the twelve days of Christmas. Most of my hooping for this project uses my 272mm x 408mm hoop. The only exception is my center design that uses my 200mm x 200mm hoop. I created 3 versions before I got the design placed successfully, including breaking my outer ribbon for July’s design. I ended up with 7 hoopings to stitch out, excluding the quilting.

Below are pictures of my first version, including cutting the applique. For the second version of the design, I tested the stitching without using my applique. For this test I used the ‘knife’ tool to ‘split’ the outer ribbon. It was much closer than my first stitch out but you can still see the ribbon has not fully lined up correctly. As I stitched this one, I revised the design a third time for my final version.

For the third design, to break the ribbon, I created a circle 22.5” in diameter. Next, I used the ‘12’ and ‘3’ clock positions and digitized an open shape, tracing along the curve from “12” to “3”. Next, I zoomed in and ‘reshaped’ the curve to match the 22.5” circle. Then, using the ‘circle layout’ tool, I replicated 3 times. Finally, I zoomed in to make sure the 4 arcs were laying on top of the solid ring. Finally, I was able to delete the initial 22.5” circle and changed the ‘4 arcs’ stitch type from single stitch to ‘single motif’. Below are images of my final design files, the applique cut using my ScanNCut SDX330D, stitchout test1, amd stitchout test2.