Machines

I am excited about the future of Betty Jo’s Fabric Arts. Now that Drawing Nigh is completed, I am working to finish my Hoffman Challenge quilt. I have the top nearly finished, and only have to applique on the animals. The focus is oversized butterflies, which are flying playfully through a happy, whimsical forest. I am going to have to figure how I want to quilt this quilt, but I expect to get to the sandwiching and quilting in a day or two.

Some of you may already know the really good news…my Bernina 830 LE, named “Gibbs” was repaired yesterday by Lew, the magician tech who works at G Street Fabrics Bernina section. It had somehow gotten everything way out of timing among other things and there was a big knot of thread he pulled out of it, but I THINK that was a result not a cause of the problem. Nevertheless, he says it is in good shape and should keep going for a good long time.

More than ever now I believe I need to get a dedicated quilting machine to help move my quilting a higher level and reduce the stress on my domestic machines, especially Gibbs. I have been doing a lot of research on sit down longarms. I had a lot of you all give me some great feedback to my question about what you think I should look into. While I was at the Mid Atlantic Quilt Festival, I tried a bunch of them there. That left just a few to look into.

After all the research and a family conference with my sons and Beth (my daughter in law), I have decided on a Bernina Q20. The dealer is closer (a big point), the machine stitch is beautiful and smooth, and it has a really great stitch regulator (which I particularly wanted). I had some good feedback from people who have one, and the G Street Bernina dealership has provided me a very good price on one and the table, and starting tomorrow there is a 60 month interest free finance special and sale.

I am now trying to figure out how I can fit it into my studio, and I think I can. Like a computer adventure game, it starts at a different place from where it will end up and things need to be solved along the way. I first have to go through my dressers and closets and empty enough from them to remove one of my two dressers. It is high time anyway, since I still have a bunch of things I no longer wear now that I don’t have a government job that required a totally different wardrobe. Doable, but somewhat overwhelming.

After I remove the dresser, I will move the Koala cabinet that I use with my backup/alternate Berninas (the B350, and the old 1230), from my office space to my bedroom where the dresser is now. The new cabinet will fit where the Koala cabinet is now in the office side of my two-small-bedroom studio. I have my ironing board set up in there, and it will not fit after the new machine is there, since it is in a somewhat wider cabinet. So I will have to figure out what to do with that. A big job, but there you are…a way forward.

Sew happy everyone. May your machine(s) play happily with your projects.

One thing for certain, my kind of fabric work requires a good quality sewing machine, and I need to be able to both embroider and free motion quilt on it a great deal (to a professional level). Working as I do, I put a lot of stress on my main machine.

On Thursday my wonderful Bernina 830 LE, whose name is Gibbs (after the Gibbs in Wilcox and Gibbs who were historically important in the development of sewing machinery) went berserk in the middle of a simple embroidery stitch-out. First it started sewing really really fast, which I managed to stop. Then it started back sewing ok for about 10 stitches, and suddenly there was a “clunk” and the needle stopped going up and down, but the bobbin was spinning at a steady pace. I tried to stop the embroidery, but the bobbin still spun. I turned the machine off and on again, and, after a few seconds, the bobbin spun. I had noticed one time before that it had stitched very fast for no apparent reason, but that was months ago and it stopped after one incident, and I cleaned and oiled it and it went back to sewing ok. I was in shock and actually cried a bit.

Gibbs at work machine appliqueing with very narrow zig zag. Note the Sashiko that I stitched out on Gibbs using the embroidery module.

Sew I don’t know whether it is prohibitively expensive to repair it (in other words, it is “dead”), or whether it is repairable. I have put about 9 million stitches on it over the course of the past four and a half years, and have used it on average probably more than 25 to 35 hours a week, with some weeks being about 50 or 60 hours. I’m taking it in to the shop on Monday. I am blessed with a very good Bernina dealership and a first rate tech (Lew) at G Street Fabrics. It is about an hour from here over heavy traffic, so I only go when I have to.

This comes at a really bad time…not that these things ever are good times…but I had just begun working on building my son Ken’s special quilt design project. This is something that requires some bits of machine embroidery. I wanted to complete this very challenging project by mid August so I could enter it into the Pennsylvania National Quilt Festival.

I took Gibbs in for his spa treatment and to fix a minor problem in March, and Lew told me then that I really used that machine hard and should buy a longarm to “share the burden” of all that stitching. I knew then that I could not even get a longarm in the house even if I could afford one. But I also started thinking about a sit down longarm.

Yesterday, my oldest son came along with my daughter in law to pick up Kevin, my grandson. While he was here we all talked about the possibilities. They know that I have been putting extra effort this year into moving my quilting up a level competitively, and am also working on a couple of books…one on applique for fabric art and one on surface design. And I have really been making a lot of good progress on all of this. Also, I have limited funds and can’t really afford to buy a new 8 series Bernina or similar machine every four years. Besides, it interrupts the flow of work when it is out of service.

Sew something needs to be done if I am to continue on this path, which I hope will eventually start making me a bit more money..in fact, it already has, but not enough to pay for a new machine. It’s a wonderful career for me as I move into my senior years. I am not the type to not have a career even if I were very wealthy. It’s the joy of creativity, and I must continue in some fashion.

Yesterday I packed up Gibbs with everything he came with to take it out on Monday, and realized my studio really needs a good cleaning. So I started that. I am setting up my Bernina B350 (Edith Claire Head…ECLAIR) and my Bernina 1230 (Betsy Ross…BETSY) and getting them all cleaned and oiled to help me through this crisis.

I know there are a lot of fabric artists out there who do not have a big advanced machine, and they make beautiful fabric art and quilts. My problem is that I am something of a techie and I have developed paths that take advantage of what these advanced machines can do. I know I could go back to not having an embroidery machine or a big harp space, but I don’t think that is the right path for me. So it is a crisis.

I am considering what to do. I can’t decide, of course, until I know whether or not Gibbs can be repaired, or if I have to replace it. But even if it can, I need to figure out what to do about the possibility of a sit down longarm to add to my store of machines. It would be a wonderful addition, and would allow me to use the main machine mostly for quilt top construction. I do like to use decorative stitching sometimes in my quilting, but it is a small percentage of my quilting and I could still use it for that. Mostly I do free motion with my Bernina Stitch Regulator. Besides, I think I could do ever better fmq on such a machine.

Sew happy everyone! I’ll let you know how this goes. Have a wonderful Mother’s Day weekend!

Betty Jo’s Fabric Arts: The Adventure Continues!

Thoughts about Machines