
Quilting on my 830 in my studio
OK gentle readers, many of you already know that I had a major crash of my wonderful old Bernina 830 LE (Gibbs). I had it for eight years. I used it a huge amount, especially since my full time retirement at the first of 2012…hours and hours. It suddenly had problems in the bobbin area and I took it to my terrific Bernina tech Lew. He is one of the best He gave it a full service and adjusted a few things and got it back to work, for all of five minutes after getting home (it stitched out a nice couple of test stitching pieces at the store beautifully). So I took it back and he managed to get it working again.
I came home and got my little Bob Ross Cherrywood Fabric challenge quilt completed. Then I made a shirt for my son for his sci-fi/fantasy writers’ conference down in Chattanooga where he is now. But I made it on my little Bernina 350, which I use for taking with me places. I also use it for several specialty sewing techniques and attachments I don’t particularly want to use on the big machine, like needle punch and the ruffler. But I was wanting to give it a good little workout (machines are better if they are used at least a little bit, but perhaps not as much as I used Gibbs…LOL).
Sew I got down to the top stitching around the edge and buttonholes. I decided to do those on Gibbs. First of all, all three of the thread sensors said I had problems with my thread and bobbin, so I turned them off. Then the auto buttonholer messed up several buttonholes. I managed to get the messup out (hard to do if you have ever tried it), and I used the manual buttonhole buttons to complete them. Then I tried to do the topstitching. I got three stitches along and Gibbs hung up (like before) with the gears of death. I cleaned it, rethreaded and oiled it and tried again…again, the gears of death. Just to make sure, I rethreaded it one more time and still got the gears of death. I concluded that Gibbs has reached the end of its professional life. Even if Lew got it going again, it would not take the high level of work I put on my machines any longer. Lew had told me that he thought there were signs that the mother board was failing, in addition to the bobbin case hook assembly probably needs to be replaced, he was pretty sure . I am fairly certain he was right.
Well Gibbs, thank you for waiting until Bernina offered a great trade in deal for all 830s and 820s, and in the month they also are including a great package of gifts with it and a 60 month with no interest. I traded for a Bernina 880 plus, which I will likely get in a couple of weeks from now. It was a fortuitous timing on Gibbs’ part. In human terms I think Gibbs was probably approaching 100 if you think about the hours and number stitches I have put on that machine….LOL…of course, that is just speculating. Lew said I had an exceptionally large number of stitches on the machine.
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So while I’m waiting I decided to address my huge studio storage of my stash and notions issue that has gotten increasingly messy and overfilled in the past five years since I did this last. My dear friend Anita, who is an artist in her own right, and my student/apprentice came over and helped me for a full day of sorting through the fabrics.
We threw away two big bags of unusable scraps, filled another big bag for Anita to take away, go through and keep what she wants, and get rid of the rest somewhere. But of course we didn’t finish. She is coming back tomorrow afternoon for another session.
Today, I am going through my threads and organizing those as much as possible, and sorting through my clothing and accessory patterns to try to reduce my three and a half filing cabines full of patterns I have collected for at least the past 15 years. I want to eliminate enough patterns so I only fill one filing cabinet with them. Then I can use them to store things like stabilizers, interfacings, other notions, and bag making supplies. I have a lot of these things…Sigh. So that will empty several of the drawers in my oak cabinet that I want to use for really special fabrics like my silks, satins, and so forth.
It is my hope to end up with empty storage spaces. This way, I can maybe even keep things in order for at least the next five years (I’m a realist…I know this will have to be repeated sometime down the road).
This way, when the new machines comes home, we can launch right into productivity. I was really upset at the expense right at first, but now I believe the new machine will be a great blessing. I developed many of my techniques on Gibbs and pretty much literally wore it out. I now have a Bernina Q20 for my quilting and free motion embroidery. I will still be using the new machine for feed dogs up quilting and zig-zag free motion, which can be done with the new BSR that is included in the package. I suspect the old one I had with Gibbs, which goes back with him, is near being worn out itself. It also comes with a new embroidery module and the old one goes back with Gibbs.
Sew I will likely be able to use the new machine for much longer if I don’t trade it in for the next top of the line in four or five years from now–which I might–since I have split off the major part of the quilting to my Q20 and some specialty attachments and activities to my B350. I suspect there are a lot of new advances I will also like. Despite my disappointment over Gibbs, I am really getting excited about this refreshment of my studio all ready for new quilts, book and workshop samples, and a few other projects.
Sew happy everyone! May your stitches be beautiful and your machines work without problems for years and years.