“I can’t believe a machine can do this!”

Description

When I got the machine all set up and running for the side border motifs, my kids kept coming in to watch with fascination as the Bernina embroidered away. My 13 year old son (in the picture above) came in and sat for about 30 minutes starring at the process. He was completely mesmerized and finally exclaimed, “Mom, I can’t believe a machine can do this!” I think it’s pretty amazing too! When doing these embroideries, I switched to the #15 embroidery foot because there were so many more layers of fabric. Everything else, I kept the same as when I did my cornerstones. It seemed to work really well. Something interesting I learned while doing the side border motifs is that you can use a different fabric for the background of the embroidery. So cool! I plan on experimenting with that in the future. A little side note. If you have the golden Anniversary cutting set, the little snips work super well trimming the background fabric really close to the tack down stitching. During one of the embroideries, I had to leave the room for a little bit. While I was gone, the bobbin thread ran out and the machine kept on embroidering away for a bit (I had turned off my bobbin sensor). I came back and didn’t know how in the world to get back to the place in the design where the bobbin thread had run out. I did a little research and realized you could use two different pictures on the screen to navigate within the embroidery design (one overall picture of the design and one that is a macro view of one area of the design). I was able to get to the exact place I needed, although I did back it up a couple of stitches to secure them. I am so impressed with the interface that Bernina uses in the 880. I am a total beginner to all of this and I am having no problem navigating through the embroidery process. The machine is a bit intimidating with all of its bells and whistles, but I am pleasantly surprised how easy it is figure out. I am so grateful for the tutorial videos Amanda is putting out too. They have been very useful through this whole process. It took me several days, but I finally finished up the side border motifs. I think these are going to be my favorite embroideries on the quilt. They are so beautiful!! I really love all the designs in the Jubilee collection, but these are my favorite! My pictures above show the embroidery background fabric before and after trimming, 2 pictures of the embroidering in process, my son watching the process, a sample of one of the embroideries all finished, the back of it (because I think it is almost as pretty as the front!), and several pictures of all of the embroideries together.