Stitch-Out!

Yikes, this was much more time-consuming than I'd bargained for! I was taking a class called Passport to Threads with Liz Kettle, from the Fabrics in Altered Art Yahoo group, on Quilters Keep Learning. One of the things Liz encourages everyone to do - in addition to the class work! - is to make some pages from two colors so that when you stitch across them with every pre-programmed stitch your sewing machine does, it really shows them off.


OKAY. My new machine has 160 pre-programmed stitches and four alphabets.


So ten hours, six bobbins full, 4 fat quarters, numerous sheets of felt and scraps of quilt batting, and nearly a whole large spool of embroidery thread later, I've got twelve pages of stitches, a small page of bar tacks, eyelets, and buttonholes, and the prospect of the alphabets still to do. Whew!

You can see the rest here.

Sorry that the photos aren't great. I took them over the arm of my chair in the living room, not exactly my best photographic effort.


I certainly learned a lot more about the Bernina 435EL Anniversary Edition in doing it. For one thing, I learned that there is really no rhyme or reason to how they arranged the stitches although I did have this vague feeling that I felt a theme developing, but then it kept going away. Hmmm... The feeling had more to do with the shape of the stitch motifs. The only other real multi-stitch machine I've ever had is my old Bernina 1010 (the old version that didn't have my favorite utility stitch, the three-step zig-zag), which only has utilitarian stitches.


While I didn't really want all these flowers and leaves and whatnot, I wanted the other things the machine does, like hmmm... gee, I can't think of what they are now. I wanted a machine that could run the embroidery unit. A lot of what I wanted was every utilitarian stitch on earth, including my favorite three-step zig-zag! I wanted a top of the line machine, and I got it! Actually, Bernina calls them sewing computers these days. I might have been able to buy a used one on eBay for somewhat less. But there's a lot of fraud on eBay with high price electronics like these sewing machines, the shipping can be prohibitive and you don't really have any way of making sure it even works as they claim. I actually feel better buying a car on eBay than one of these. So I went to the local Bernina store and bought one.


What you get with it then is 10% off everything else you buy at the store for a year as well as unlimited classes for a year. I can take the mastery classes over and over if I want to. I've taken the basic set of classes twice and I'd really recommend taking it twice to make sure that you get all of the ins and outs of using the machine. One of the things I've found hard to get used to is that you aren't supposed to pull the thread out ouf the tensioned thread path from the back. You're supposed to snip it from the spool and pull it out from the needle end.


I guess I'll get used to it. More on the new machine and me later. I'll report once I've actually done all the work towards the Threads class itself.