So we are staying home these days but working from home. What does that mean when I'm always working
at home? My work laptop came home with me and I set up a tall table in the sometimes sunny porch. There are two mornings each week where I'm in charge of monitoring our local chat service for the library and answering the group email account. We are all on internal chat so I keep up with everyone while we try to support our faculty in getting everything online for the remaining two months of class. I've learned how to work in chunks of time, taking breaks to go clear my mind; it's at those times when I will sometimes solve a problem so down time isn't always down!
Since I am no longer spending time driving for work, I not only have extra time at home but my sewing machines and projects are a nice break time diversion. Before everything started to close down I picked up two sewing machines from Goodwill auction, a Husqvarna Viking "Emma" and a Kenmore 158-1310. I couldn't resist the Emma since that's the name of one of my granddaughters but wasn't expecting much since it was just a mechanical model. This one surprised me with its solid feel, easy controls, and more than passable stitching:
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| Husqvarna Viking Emma |
It came with all you could need with extra presser feet, some tools, a few bobbins, and a great padded carrying case. There was a receipt in the pocket showing it had been bought in 2003 for a fairly hefty price considering it is mechanical, in fact it was twenty times the price I paid. You gotta love an auction. Maybe some day Emma will sew with it but not to worry because it's a solid machine that someone else would like, too.
Next up is the Kenmore 158-1310, a nice machine that seemed pretty familiar. I clean it up and test it out to find it only goes backwards. What? Again? I checked my inventory database to find I had just sold this exact model with the same problem. Of course, I don't know what I did to fix the one I sold so I put the cover on, made a note on its label, and had to walk away for the time being.
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| Kenmore 158-1310 |
Because I'm so happy with the Singer Futura XL 400, as I wrote about in
Embroidery the Easy Way?, and its embroidery functions as well as free motion, I took a chance and got a Singer Futura CE 250 embroidery sewing machine. It came with everything so there was less risk involved but I knew this was a problematic model. Upon testing it out, I could see the manuals were nearly identical so I was hoping for less of a learning curve. I was lucky that I could install the software on the same laptop as I had for the XL-400 with no problems or confusion on the part of the software but I kept getting error messages after the first project was stitched out. I kept playing with it until I got the right combination of thread and sequencing of steps but I'll need to use it more before I feel confident enough to sell it to someone. Here's a nice stitch-out:
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| Deer antlers and arrows on camouflage fabric |
I didn't even use stabilizer and it turned out this nice so now I just need to keep trying different patterns and features. I'll do it "for the cause" (said tongue-in-cheek).
Not to let too much time go by, I attacked another one of the quilt block sets I got back in September at the river Rats TOGA. With one under my belt, pieced but not quilted (a future blog post), I got out a Joann's Block-of-the-Month set from 1997 where the blocks were all done and an attempt to assemble them. It looked like there had been a change of heart with some purple sparkle fabric added to the sashing but I took that out and started over again. Here was part of the planning:
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| Blue BOM 1997 with new sashing |
This was the easy part since the blocks were all done and a pretty nice job of it, too. I used my Singer 66 treadle since this came from a treadle sewing group and that made it even more fun. Here it is all assembled:
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| Final assembly, waiting to be quilted |
Because it has a white background, I needed white batting so I ordered Quilters Dream batting. I've seen it talked up in a few of the quilting books and it gets great reviews but it's a bit pricey so this was a smaller project to try it out on, only 45" by 60". This is also a smaller project for continuing to practice my free-motion quilting skills so it's a bit of a win-win.
Let's continue to keep busy and keep sewing because this is one way we can head off the pandemic: stay home (and keep sewing).
