First of all, thank you for your very lovely comments last week. I am very lucky to have such kind readers! I’m afraid I don’t have perhaps the prettiest of posts today, but it is on one of my favourite subjects, colour. One of the joys of playing with embroidery is not just playing with threads, textures and shapes but also playing with colours. Machine embroidery threads come in a really dazzling array of choices and I will say I have been building up quite the collection, but it’s still never really enough…
Read More »Tag: bernina 790
Sampling with the Felt Detective
I’d had such a great experience with the badge felt at the class at London Embroidery Studio that I’ve been scouring the internet to try and find a supplier of something similar. This is always a challenge when you just have a sample of the material and you can’t exactly touch and check things online… Plus, I am always quite surprised how few places stock machine embroidery supplies. I guess this is partly as a lot of places that do cater more for the commercial end, so while 200 m of stabiliser sounds great, it’s probably not something you want to live with!
Read More »Feeding the Bernina…
Half the fun of blogging is sharing with people not when things go right, but when things go horribly wrong. I feel it’s a public service when I can make mistakes so you don’t have to. This week’s incident involved giving the Bernina a good, fabric meal to chew on…
Read More »Embroidered Patches
A while ago, I had a go at designing and digitising my own patches. It wasn’t a complete failure, but far from a success either. One of the big problems I’d had was not having a strong enough water-soluble stabiliser so the design ended up not really registering properly as it moved as the layers were being sewn together…
Read More »Goodbye 2020!
Traditionally, my first post of the new year is a chance to say welcome to the new year. This year I think I’ll break with traditional slightly and the new year’s post will be a chance to say goodbye to the old one! Well, 2020, what can I say?
Read More »Christmas Card Panic!
Nothing like a good Christmas deadline to focus the mind and needle… Traditionally, I am terrible at Christmas. I barely manage to get Christmas cards to friends and people who definitely deserve it, even though I really appreciate everyone who is infinitely more competent, organised and takes the time to think of me. I usually deal with this by an absolute refusal to make handmade Christmas gifts, saving them for birthdays instead, but I did want to at least try and redeem myself as a human being this year…
Read More »Digitising Sampler
Machine embroidery is a lot of fun and there’s a huge wealth of designs out there that come both with the machine and are available either for free or a small price. As I did for my previous monogrammed card, these designs can be combined either on the machine itself or using some embroidery design software.

Making Machine Embroidered Cards
If you are into machine embroidery and haven’t seen Machine Embroidery Geek’s website, I really recommend taking a look. There’s lot of great resources but definitely my favourite part is where she justifies the cost of buying an embroidery machine with ‘how much you will save on gifts’. Perhaps I am a particularly miserly and uncharitable soul, but this seems like a very weak justification for which the maths does not add up, unless you attach a monetary value to the fun and joy that comes with making gifts on the machine.

The Bernina Beast (790 Plus)
There is a new member of the family that I have yet to have the pleasure of introducing you all to yet… My new Bernina 790 Plus. (Complete with embroidery module because the thing wasn’t monstrously huge enough without it).