My Bestest New Quilting Gadget

Okay I am not making this up.  Today I checked the caller ID on the phone and it gave the name of the place where my Bernina is being repaired.  The message light was blinking.  I hit the button, expecting to hear my baby was back and ready to be brought home.....and...... FAIL.  Evidently the repairman is going to go out on medical leave and so all repairs will be delayed for two more weeks.  Rats.  I feel really bad for the repairman - I can't imagine what would necessitate 2 week medical leave and I will certainly say a few prayers for a speedy recovery.  It's kind of a moot point - even if the Bernina was back, I wouldn't be in my sewing room in these temperatures.  It's freakishly HOT, day after day.

So lets lighten the mood with a website that will make many, MANY quilters very happy.  It's a wonderful site  by Incompetech Creative Industries. Check it out - it is fun to just play with and see what you can create.  This site will generate grids, graph paper, hexagons, circles - you name it, you can make it.  The finished product is a one click download of a PDF of your new file.  I chose to make a 1 inch square grid on 11 x 17 paper so I could lay out my cherry blocks.  I taped a few sheets together and have this WONDERFUL surface to lay out and align the cherries, play around with placement - it's GENIUS!   And it's  free!!  You can change the line weights and colors, too.

You're welcome!

Bernina Blues

Gloom, despair and agony. The Bernina 1090 is in the shop getting a cleanup, and the Bernina dude called my house today to leave a message.

That is never good.

It was too soon for it to be ready to be picked up, so I knew there were problems. I played back the message and heard that problem one was a switch that would cost about $29 to replace.  No problem!  The second - the motherboard was a little toasted, unable to regulate stitch length....ever again.   I was a little relieved, because I thought it was me monkeying around with my machine and unable to reset it properly.  Then the relief passed, and the realization that it is a failing motherboard set in.  He wants to take it out - send it to BERNINA - and have it rebuilt.

CRAP.   CRAPCRAPCRAP.

If it took me 5 weeks to get a freakin' needle clamp screw, how long is it going to take to get a motherboard rebuilt?  It's going to run me about $200 (ouch) and I haven't found out if he'll warranty the work.   I am honked.  I have a quilt to finish that is about ONE YEAR overdue.  I've got 2 projects spread out on the guest bed and I want them DONE AND MOVED.

The Bernina was my mother's machine, and I have such a sentimental attachment to it - I'd never let it go.  I even hauled the little dealie my dad built for it all the way from Nebraska to Massachusetts. It has their karma all over it - it has Mom's love of quilting  embedded inside the machine, and my dad's love of my mother infused in  the custom-built sewing desk/table.

I just want it to WORK.  Nothing fancy, just SEW.  HERE.   NOW.

I am going outside to cut some herbaceous peonies and then come in and open a bottle of wine.

CRAP.

Digital Filing

I taught -- and still teach-- people to use computers, software, etc. so you'll forgive my OCD around digital organization.  I like my computer indexed.  Unfortunately, this obsession does not apply to my sewing room.  I love computers, I spend time surfing the internet, reading blogs, and when I come across lovely things I want to keep for inspiration,  I need a place to put them.

This folder (NEEDLEWORK) is on my desktop. It is the fastest and easiest place to throw stuff when I right-click and hit "save image as."  Yesterday was a quiet day at the store, so I put this folder on a flash drive and brought it to work.  I spent some time organizing it in to smaller, topic-specific folders.  (Again with the organizational thing.)  At the same time,  I weeded out the "meh" stuff and threw those pictures in to the digital wastebasket.   The  process of cataloging  images refreshes me, energizes me, and gets me off my computer chair and back in to the sewing room.

I will confess  I have spent the past half hour surfing around looking at quilts.   This time, when I saw images I wanted to keep for inspiration,  I merely right-clicked the mouse and put them EXACTLY where they needed to go.

Now I need to get up from this chair and make some of those projects a reality!

Trouble with Templates

Houston we have a problem.  Instead of spending what little free time I have working on my quilts,  I have found myself on my computer endlessly auditioning and rearranging my blog.  There are templates galore, customizable headers, themes, pictures,  ink color changes - it's like digital quilting. I have addiction issues around computers. I can annihilate an entire day just surfing, reading, tweaking, looking at fabric, newspapers, video, and weird websites. Maybe it is just vacuuming avoidance, laundry  evasion or some other malady.  Maybe it is because the women in my family carry a procrastination gene that scientists dream about studying.  I do not know.  I just know that I need to snap out of it, unplug my computer (literally) and get back in my sewing room.