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The last six months have been a bit of a rollercoaster ride, with two moves, a new job and all the general chaos and upheaval that comes along with that. It has been rather exhausting and the whole thing has seen me decoupled from a lot of my crafting equipment, my stash as well as all my usual routines.

I keep expecting things to settle down a little more and that I might have five minutes to think but I’m beginning to realise that this is something of a pipe dream. I’ve had lots of really awesome professional opportunities but this always seem to involve even more disruption and while I’m very grateful to be involved in some super cool things, there have been a few moments lately where I wouldn’t have minded the opportunity for a nap.

Sometimes though being thrown completely out of routine can be a good thing. While I am very much missing the RSN, I’ve found a new embroidery group with a different style and take on things and I’ve been doing a bit more designing. I’ve been wanting to focus more on doing smaller pieces and just trying and experimenting to have fun rather than working on larger pieces where it can get a bit stressful with ‘everything having to be right’. Smaller, digestible projects are also a better match for my energy levels at present!

There has been a recent new addition to the family too… a Bernina B350 PE. This purchase felt a little disloyal to my old Janome Memory Craft 5900 QC that’s currently living somewhere over the sea but I’m going to have to begrudgingly admit that I really, really like the Bernina. I’m pretty sure there is at least some quantity of lead in this machine because, despite its tiny footprint, it weighs an incredible amount but it is absolutely unperturbedly precise in its stitching.

I never really managed to find the time for as much sewing machine as I wanted to do. I tried some dressmaking and a few small projects, like my dearly beloved pincushion, but never really got to the stage where I found much enjoyment in it or felt like I could really do anything useful. I don’t think my Janome particularly helped sometimes with its love of chewing up as much fabric through the feed dogs as often as it could – a problem I never really managed to get diagnosed.

Maybe it’s from moving and realising that life would occasionally be much easier if I could just create a few items to fit in places or serve some particular purpose that has made me want to have another go at sewing again. I have neither the time, patience or skillset for hand sewing anything functional so there isn’t much choice other than to master the new machine!

Rather than jumping in with some ridiculously complex quilt design, I’m going to work on some small mini-projects that can ideally be finished in less than a few hours just to get used to the machine and get a bit more confidence cutting and measuring fabrics. I don’t know why I have this ridiculous fear of ‘wasting’ fabric or getting things wrong as soon as a rotary cutter is involved but hopefully exposure therapy will be the cure.

So far, I only have nice things to say about the Bernina, which is a little annoying because I don’t want to join the cult of ‘once a Bernina user, always a Bernina user’ but I cannot deny that it’s so easy to use it practically sews everything itself and no matter what stupidity I try and do with it, it never misses a perfectly formed, evenly tensioned stitch… Watch this space.