December 2007

It seems like I did the piecing on this one forever ago. But it is finally done and up on Etsy.

Zelda and finishing the 30s Reproduction Pineapple quilt are next up.

Nothing like waiting until the last minute. I bought a kit for a Christmas quilt back um, cough, cough, mid-June. I finally finished it about 5 days before Christmas. I’ve made a million quilts between then and now including an almost identical Christmas quilt for a gift but of course ours isn’t done until now. Oh well.

The last third of this was quilted on the new machine.

Now that the Hinterberg Voyager 17 mess is all over with it was time to look for (another) new machine to help with quilting.  I went back to what I had been looking at — the Pfaff Grand Quilter.  Did some reading and decided that’s what I wanted.

The local dealer didn’t have the Pfaff in stock but they did have the Viking Husqvarna version (the Mega Quilter).  Tried it out.  Sold.  It was a little dicey at the beginning when they were showing me the machine and the thread kept breaking.  I almost ran out of the store screaming.  Thankfully the bobbin case just wasn’t inserted all the way.  A little nudge and it was stitching flawlessly.

In my reading before going into the store I found out the Pfaff and Viking are made by Janome and Janome has a 9″ machine with their label as well but we decided that it was worth buying the Pfaff so we could have local dealer support if necessary.

The is a carefully cropped photo… the mess beside, below and beyond the machine must not be revealed.

It’s only done a little bit of work so far but it stitched beautifully.  Wub.

We have a silly little tradition of matching family PJs on Christmas morning. In previous years we’ve gone with Gymboree but they look exactly the same year after year. We needed something different this year.

Being a Hanna (Andersson) addict, I naturally turned to them. The boys were going to wear blue snowflakes and the girls got pink snowflakes. So I ordered them, tried them on and promptly returned them. I’m ok with the kids looking like little snausages, but Sean and I? Uh, no thanks.

Old Navy had a cute pair of snowman PJ pants but I guess they don’t do the cutesy family matching since they didn’t sell coordinating pairs for the kiddos. So I decided to make some myself! I ordered us all white tops, 2 pairs of pants for Sean and I and the largest size ON carries, Triple-XL.

Through the magic of scissors and a sewing machine we went from pants to this …

to this …

Christmas is saved! We can all match!

Big week here at Carolina Patchworks. Our CEO Liam has been hard at work.

On Sunday, December 9 he got his first tooth!

On Tuesday, December 11 he decided to sit up by himself!

On Thursday, December 13 he got that last bit of umph and rolled from his back to his belly!

I hope he isn’t crawling by Saturday.

Sean has this crazy idea of sewing me something for Christmas. I honestly have no idea what he’s up to but he scared the carp out of me when he asked for sewing lessons.

The conversation went something like this.

Emily: You want to sew? Using *my* machine? Do you know how much that thing cost?

Sean: Yes, actually, I do know how much it cost. I paid for it.

Ok, so he did pay for it.

I told him he could indeed use the machine but if he breaks it, I’m upgrading to Pfaff’s new TOL creative vision (lowercase letters included).

You have to get the price from a dealer but most dealers, or at least the PITA dealer here in Raleigh, won’t give you the price over the phone. They are so paranoid about the competition undercutting them on pricing they won’t give out a price unless you go into the store (never mind the fact that they are the *only* dealer in Raleigh. Who are they competing against?). And then they have two pieces of paper with two different prices on them. I guess the more special you are, the better the price is? So if I wanted to know how much it costs, I’d have to drag both kids in with me to listen to the 4 hour sales schpele while corralling a three year old who wants to pull all the thread out of the display and a 7 month old who wants to spit up and drool all over the fabric (smart kid… drooling over fabric at such a young age). And they’d probably be so annoyed with the kids destroying their store that I would get the more expensive price.

I’ve read things here and there that say the price of this machine is somewhere between $8,000 and $10,000. If I ever do have the money to buy this machine, it will *not* be from the dealer here in Raleigh. I don’t like them and I would never give them my business especially on a machine that costs that much.

Right, this isn’t supposed to be a vent about a Pfaff dealer.

Anywho… so Sean wants to use my machine.

So he asked for a lesson on how to use the machine. It started with winding a bobbin and threading the machine. It’s amazing how I don’t even think about what I’m doing with that machine anymore. I can probably thread it in my sleep so explaining how to was quite a challenge. Once Sean saw all the nooks and crannies he had to wrap thread in and out of, he started laughing hysterically.

So we made it through a couple practice runs and I think he might be able to sew a somewhat straight line now. I hope he remembers what all the buttons do.

Perhaps I will be machine shopping after the weekend.

All done and up on Etsy. I think Sean secretly wishes it won’t sell so he can keep it.

Want a video game quilt?

Gotta love the quilt stand with legs.

Sean playing on the big screen.

What shall I do next? I’m thinking Mario Brothers or Zelda.

Hinty (aka the Hinterberg Voyager 17) is going bye-bye (aka returned).