I was a little worried when I settled down to start machine quilting Nature’s Notebook this morning. I really didn’t know how my Madeira rayon thread would work for machine quilting. I’ve read so much on the web about the Bernina 820 being really temperamental about the threads it will accept, but hey, you never know unless you try!

Last week this arrived in the mail:

I have another of Diana Gaudynski’s books and can confirm that she really truly is the goddess of free machine quilting.  I’m sure you know that FMQ used to scare the socks off me – but reading Diane has really made me brave enough to try it. Her books are excellent and just make it all seem, well…do-able.

I mastered stippling a while ago – done that, time to move on to something more exciting…really I want to do feathers, but I think I need to practice actually drawing feathers for a while and thought I might be chancing my luck if I got that adventurous. So instead I decided to have a go at Diane’s ‘headbands’, which are certainly a move in the direction of feathers and have all those lovely free curvy shapes.

I AM IN HEAVEN!!

Not only has the 820 behaved IMPECCABLY – probably in part due to the amazing stitch regulator, but the threads worked perfectly too. Right from the very first stitch! No jumped stitches, no breaking threads, no tension issues, just perfect, even problem-free sewing. (All wobbles and bumps are purely down to an operator who needs a lot more practice!) Of course it helps that I have the longer arm on the 820, so I’m not short of space, but I also invested in a table that the machine is set into, so I’m working flat on the table top, which is just brilliant.

After a stressful week I can feel all the tension just running away as I sit here and make lovely swirly shapes.

Wonderful! I need this!!

Helen

This entry was posted on Friday, July 15th, 2011 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Quilting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.