The New Sewing Machine

I had a sewing machine pretty much fall into my lap!

Cindy, my quilting sister, has a quilting friend who is moving up in the world, and offered her previous machine for sale.  It's a Bernina Artiste 640.  She was asking $500 for it.  The package includes several standard feet, a walking foot, a Bernina Stitch Regulator foot, and an extra-large table for working with quilts.  I might expect to see a package like this on E-Bay for nearly $2,000.

After a bit of discussion, I decided to buy it.

We decided to drive to Pennsylvania to pick it up, and to see Cindy's newly remodeled kitchen.  Mom wanted to see it too, so we invited her.

In the meantime, Cindy was familiarizing herself with the machine, and found that the stitch length adjustment knob was broken.  The knob is connected to the machine by a thin plastic shaft, and it can easily be broken if the knob is pushed sideways somehow.  So she drove to her Bernina dealer, an hour's drive each way.  The dealer replaced the knob, then opened the machine, cleaned everything out, and made sure it was working perfectly.  It took two hours.  Cindy asked him how much she owed him.  He said, "Nothing".  She insisted on paying something, so he charged her $12.50, the price of the knob.

Lynn was concerned about possibly ugly snow when driving, but weather forecasts looked OK.  We'd expect some snow, but it shouldn't be bad.  Wrong.  We stopped at a gas station maybe an hour away from her house.  It wasn't snowing when we went in.  When we came out, it was near whiteout.  We proceeded anyway.  The only way I could tell where I was supposed to be going was by following the taillights of the truck in front.  We got to the Phillipsburg exit and called Cindy to ask if we should get off I-80 there or stay on.  She said to get off.  About that time, the snow tapered down to a reasonable amount, and the rest of the drive had no problem.  We found out the next morning that there had been a multi-vehicle accident on I-80, about where and when we would have been if we had stayed on I-80.

We had a very pleasant stay with Cindy.  She introduced me to the machine's main functions.  At one point, she tried to show me how to use a buttonhole stitch to do applique.  We set the machine for 4-mm stitch length.  It gave us 0 stitch length.  Other decorative stitches actually stitched backward.  She couldn't figure it out.  Finally, since Bernina calls the machine a sewing computer, she decided to do what you do when computers act up:  turn it off and back on again.  That cleared up the problem.

I asked Cindy about Y seams.  Those are seams where three seams have to meet at a point.  She said that you just locate exactly where the seams will begin and end, and make sure that's where they do begin and end.  If you do that carefully, it works.

When we got home Sunday, Lynn worked to straighten up the office so I could have a place to sew.  Tonight (Monday), I finished moving things around and got out the machine and tried to do a Y seam.  It worked!

The Stars and Squares Quilt is DONE!

The Stars and Squares quilt is done!  Finished!  Quilted!  Only one last thing remains: adding the pouches for a hanging bar.

The Top is Done!

The top of the Stars and Squares quilt is done!

The borders were more difficult than I had expected.  I had finished a set of borders a few months ago, but when I went to attach them to the main part of the top, I found that each square of the border was 2 7/8 inches wide instead of 3 inches.  The cumulative error was too much to work with.  I had to remake the borders.

When I sewed the first new border to the main section, I found the edges did not line up.  Some of the blocks were not exactly 9 inches wide.  Fortunately, they were all smaller than that.  So, I had to identify where the narrow blocks were, undo a seam in the border, slice off a bit of one square, and sew the border back together.  Actually, it wasn't really that much of a pain.

Now all I have to is quilt it and bind it.

 

Most of the Top is Done!

Except for the borders, the top is done!

I may need to sew some yellow cloth behind the yellow pieces, since they are somewhat translucent.  Or maybe just having the white batting behind them will be enough.  For this picture, the top was draped over a dark brown couch.

Assembling the large 3-triangle blocks was unexpectedly difficult.  I had planned to just cut the pieces out with a quarter-inch seam allowance and sew them together, but on the rare times when I actually sewed the correct pieces together, they refused to come out correctly.  Either the top and bottom edges were not parallel, or the piece was the wrong size, or (more commonly) both.  I hadn't paper-pieced them because the pattern would have been 9 1/2 inches wide, and I didn't have a printer that wide.  So, after struggling with one block for three hours, I posted a message on a couple of quilting groups on Yahoo titled "Pulling My Hair Out".  Several responses suggested paper piecing.  I remembered that we have a nice big printer at work that handles 11 x 17-inch paper.  I made patterns, and pieced them with no further problem.

The only remaining problem happened when trying to assemble the middle and bottom strips.  The inner corners did not meet.  It turned out the center block on the bottom (blue and red triangles) was 9 3/8 inches wide instead of 9 1/2 inches.  I was able to stretch it out by ironing, and got the seams to match.

The First Block

Believe it or not, I've actually been working on the Stars and Squares quilt!  The borders have been completed, and I am working on the main portion.  I have finished my first nine-patch block!  It's the center block of the quilt.  Here it is:

This was not done without tribulation.  I had to sew the final seam four times.  The first time, the three patches I added were offset by a quarter inch.  The second time, I sewed the wrong edges together!  The third time, the center point didn't match the center seam of the central square.  The fourth time was the charm.

Stars and Squares, or Quiltfilia

For the last couple of days I've been suffering a severe attack of quiltfilia, a strong, unreasonable desire to quilt something.  One possible reason could be a visit Lynn and I paid to a little art gallery in Peninsula.  There were a few little quilts there, no more than about 2 by 3 feet, which were quite charming.  Their appeal was not at all reduced by the fact that none of the seams were straight.  So, I can probably do at least that well. 

I wanted something easy, but with a strong geometrical appeal.  I've thought about making a major quilt with a Star of David motif (no, I'm not Jewish, I just think it would be fun).  But this will be a minor quilt, so I can use easy stars.  I came up with a design I call "Stars and Squares":

Becky, my oldest daughter, is expecting her first baby in July.  Do you think this can be ready by then?  Stay tuned!



The Baby Quilt Finished

I spent almost all my free time for a couple of months working on the baby quilt, and I finished it!  My sister Barb came up with the idea of quilting letters and numbers in the blank squares of the bottom half.  Here are a couple of photographs: