Some needlepoint and a little update

First off...I got the tank put together.

New tank, with new sending unit and new gasket. I find this image to be pretty fucking beautiful.

But you wanna know what's super hilarious? I probably didn't need to buy the new sending unit. I still had to really struggle and sort of manipulate/bend it a little to get it flush and locked in.
On the other hand, now I don't have to fuss with the extra vent/return line that I would've had to block off. And what's another $40 in the grand scheme of this beast of a money-sucking project anyway, right?

And now for something completely different.
I may have mentioned my return to embroidery. It sort of came about when I was binge watching free craft videos last month, during the snow storms and such. I played around with my old skirt project, which is fun simply because it's just freestyle using two of my favorite stitches (chain stitch and french knots).
But I wanted to move on and try some of the other hundreds of stitches out there. I looked on line for some free sampler patterns, but they were all a little too 'cutesy' for me. Then I thought of the sticker my friend had just given me of her new business logo.
Why not do a little wall hanging for her? So I printed it out...and 8x10 was just too big. I shrunk it down to a 4x4 image and then went to my fabric stash to find a good piece of material to use. But I actually only have little fat quarters of printed fabric...and a couple old tote bags!
Perfect! So I traced out the logo and picked out some colors.

And then the anxiety began when I realized the shrunken image was going to make for some tiny letters, which I had never really done before.

I actually ended up stitching, removing the stitching, erasing the pencil marks, redrawing, erasing again...eventually I had to just go for it blindly and hope it looked centered when I was done.
I definitely do not like doing small print! That is an advanced skill.

I had to pull out some stitches, I ended up getting the bag handles tangled in the stitches more than once, I made knots where there should not have been knots, and I had to go over a few stitches to make them look better, but over all I was pretty happy with the results!

So originally it was just going to stay in a hoop which I was going to jazz up by covering the back and maybe add some ribbon around the outside. But once it became a bag, I was faced with exposed stitching on the inside of the bag...which would make for a pretty dangerous situation once she tried putting anything in it that might snag a stitch.
Being overly anxious to give it to her at work before her days off, I gave it to her without the added coverage on the inside. My plan was to hand stitch a little circle of fabric.
But of course, since she fell immediately in love with it, she didn't want to give it back and said she'd just put something over it herself.
Now she wants me to make more for her future events. Which I am not likely to do, as it's a lot of damn work! But it did give me an idea to maybe make some iron on patches. It would be less of a hassle to just crank out some logos on a straight piece of fabric to just cut out and make into patches. We'll see. I could make them a little smaller and leave off the 'eat.breathe.inspire.' bit...

After that, I was still jonesing for some fun stitching project. So I got out the other bag I found in my stash and just did a couple elements from a larger sampler I had.

These bags are nearly impossible to iron after being in the tight hoops!

(And the color of this bag threw off my camera ...I could not get the color/exposure right...kinda hurts the eyes, doesn't it!?)