Hello Learning Curve!!

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Hello learning curve!!! If I thought there was a learning curve for piecing the blocks, boy was I in for a surprise! I have never done embroidery in my entire life. I have always admired it and wondered about the mystical world of embroidery and how it is all done. Now was my chance to learn how. Of course, I decided to use the gold metallic thread because it is so shiny and elegant. What I didn’t know, but soon found out, metallic thread is one of the most difficult to embroider with. It seems to have quite the finicky personality! After many thread breakages, I decided to make another trip to Quilt Beginnings for some advice. Their employees are real experts on Bernina machines and all things sewing/quilting/embroidering. They gave me several good tips, and so did Amanda Murphy on the blog. I ended up using/doing the following: #26 embroidery foot, Bernina metallic needles, a freestanding spool, slowed the speed down to about ¼ of the fastest speed, lowered the thread tension and actually tightened the bobbin tension two clicks (that was something new I learned how to do). That seemed to be the magic formula and my Bernina then embroidered like a dream. It was amazing to watch and the embroidery turned out so beautifully!! I spent almost three solid days from about 5:30 in the morning to 9:30 at night embroidering the cornerstones. It could have possibly taken less time if I didn’t have to stop to cook, change diapers, play a couple games with my 6 year old, teach home school, etc. Sometimes I wish I could just pause time for a little bit so I could get a bunch done without interruptions and then life could resume again. Wouldn’t that be nice?! I know my husband would like that too. I think he is feeling a little neglected because he jokingly mentioned the other day that he thinks I love my Bernina more than him. He might be right…Just kidding! I explained that I was in a bit of a time crunch with the deadline of this quilt-a-long contest looming, so I had to put in some long hours. Good thing I am enjoying this so much! With the cornerstones all embroidered, I finished doing the stitch and flip on those blocks. I have to say, after all the work of embroidering, I was a bit nervous to cut the blocks to trim the seams down. I didn’t want to cut the wrong thing by accident! But I was careful and they are now all finished. I can finally say, “I know how to embroider on my Bernina 880!” Once I figured out how to work with the metallic thread and watched Amanda’s tutorial video, the rest was pretty easy!