In a world that constantly changes, things come and go, and rug hooking supplies are no exception. For those that don’t already know, Red Dot tracing material is no longer being produced and no one is crying more than me. It actually scares the heck out of me. We will never stamp our patterns so what’s a girl to do? We have a small light box that hubby built for me back when I opened the studio which will be hauled out and dusted off for smaller patterns but what to do about the larger ones? Using a light box while trying to keep the linen straight and moving it around to capture all the design will be a nightmare. Not to mention our tables are too high for the box so we have to modify or build another work area and where is that supposed to reside?
There is a substitute red dot on the market, better in that it is 45” wide instead of the standard 36”, but it’s too thick and the marker doesn’t bleed through. I ordered a sample to try with high expectations and was sadly disappointed. It only works half as well and only with a marker with a sharp point. Once the marker dulls and loses some of its ink, good luck. Markers are not cheap so we try to maximize what we get from them and that will be a thing of the past once we are forced to use the new stuff.
I found a few sources of the old Red Dot and bought up as much as I could paying a hefty price of $8.00 a yard at Fabricville, but what option did I have? Deborah certainly gets the most out of the red dot patterns we have, using them until they are thread bare. I’m hoping the rug hooking community will scream and holler so the company puts the good Red Dot back on their production line, pretty please before my stock dwindles.
Unfortunately, we will no longer be selling it to the public. We have to covet what we have to stay in business. Folks have moaned at us but I don’t really think they understand how important producing patterns is to our shop. I would hate to think the lack of red dot is what foils us, causes us to close our doors. We manage to carry on with a low Canadian dollar, the high cost of US exchange when ordering supplies from the states kills us, it takes 30% or more of our profit margin right off the top. We survived losing the source of burlap, managed a frightful year when Majic Carpet Dyes were unavailable, and many other changes that put us in a bit of a tail spin, it would be devastating to think something as thin and simple as a tracing medium could be the end of us.
Some people use screening material but storage on that would be tough as it couldn’t be folded like red dot and filed away with the original drawings in our cabinets. We’d have rolls of it all over the place. We might have to think outside the box, the light box that is, and come up with solutions to this dilemma. Perhaps there is an interfacing on the market that is thinner; if anyone knows of such a product please let us know. When I bought what I could find I paid a premium but at this point beggars can’t be choosy so I doled out as much cash as was needed to get it to our door. We will be using it sparingly; every scrap will be utilized, treated like gold.
Usually we can get 30 or more patterns out of the tracing material and sometimes more. Over the weekend hubby worked to create a new red dot for one of our patterns called Catch of the Day II. A customer ordered the pattern and all I could think while I was drawing it, what a saint Deb is to have worked with such a crappy piece of red dot. It stuck to me like spider webbing, any roughness to my hands grabbed it so it was difficult to pin to the linen when I was always pulling it off. For me the feeling of the polyester on my fingers is worse than fingernails on a blackboard. There was swearing and yucks coming out of me until hubby stepped in to the rescue. In all good conscience, after I struggled to make a pattern for an order, I couldn’t put that old red dot back in the drawer for Deb to use so hubby drew off a new one.
I don’t like change, I’m about as flexible as a two by four, perhaps even as thick, so I fight the new and don’t adapt to anything that makes my life harder. In this day and age life should be getting easier, not taking a step backwards. All this new-fangled crap isn’t worth the powder to blow it up. Red Dot don't RIP, come back kicking and screaming, we need you! If not I'll have to embrace another change and crawl begrudgingly over this latest hurtle to make room for the next problem that's waiting in the wings.
So I've had my rant and now I will chill.....after all, it’s not like The Dorr Mill stopped selling natural wool……
There is a substitute red dot on the market, better in that it is 45” wide instead of the standard 36”, but it’s too thick and the marker doesn’t bleed through. I ordered a sample to try with high expectations and was sadly disappointed. It only works half as well and only with a marker with a sharp point. Once the marker dulls and loses some of its ink, good luck. Markers are not cheap so we try to maximize what we get from them and that will be a thing of the past once we are forced to use the new stuff.
I found a few sources of the old Red Dot and bought up as much as I could paying a hefty price of $8.00 a yard at Fabricville, but what option did I have? Deborah certainly gets the most out of the red dot patterns we have, using them until they are thread bare. I’m hoping the rug hooking community will scream and holler so the company puts the good Red Dot back on their production line, pretty please before my stock dwindles.
Unfortunately, we will no longer be selling it to the public. We have to covet what we have to stay in business. Folks have moaned at us but I don’t really think they understand how important producing patterns is to our shop. I would hate to think the lack of red dot is what foils us, causes us to close our doors. We manage to carry on with a low Canadian dollar, the high cost of US exchange when ordering supplies from the states kills us, it takes 30% or more of our profit margin right off the top. We survived losing the source of burlap, managed a frightful year when Majic Carpet Dyes were unavailable, and many other changes that put us in a bit of a tail spin, it would be devastating to think something as thin and simple as a tracing medium could be the end of us.
Some people use screening material but storage on that would be tough as it couldn’t be folded like red dot and filed away with the original drawings in our cabinets. We’d have rolls of it all over the place. We might have to think outside the box, the light box that is, and come up with solutions to this dilemma. Perhaps there is an interfacing on the market that is thinner; if anyone knows of such a product please let us know. When I bought what I could find I paid a premium but at this point beggars can’t be choosy so I doled out as much cash as was needed to get it to our door. We will be using it sparingly; every scrap will be utilized, treated like gold.
Usually we can get 30 or more patterns out of the tracing material and sometimes more. Over the weekend hubby worked to create a new red dot for one of our patterns called Catch of the Day II. A customer ordered the pattern and all I could think while I was drawing it, what a saint Deb is to have worked with such a crappy piece of red dot. It stuck to me like spider webbing, any roughness to my hands grabbed it so it was difficult to pin to the linen when I was always pulling it off. For me the feeling of the polyester on my fingers is worse than fingernails on a blackboard. There was swearing and yucks coming out of me until hubby stepped in to the rescue. In all good conscience, after I struggled to make a pattern for an order, I couldn’t put that old red dot back in the drawer for Deb to use so hubby drew off a new one.
I don’t like change, I’m about as flexible as a two by four, perhaps even as thick, so I fight the new and don’t adapt to anything that makes my life harder. In this day and age life should be getting easier, not taking a step backwards. All this new-fangled crap isn’t worth the powder to blow it up. Red Dot don't RIP, come back kicking and screaming, we need you! If not I'll have to embrace another change and crawl begrudgingly over this latest hurtle to make room for the next problem that's waiting in the wings.
So I've had my rant and now I will chill.....after all, it’s not like The Dorr Mill stopped selling natural wool……
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