Busy Summer!

What a busy summer it has been! If I wasn’t sick, I was busy packing and getting ready to move (hopefully in just a few weeks). We will be moving into a house with a lot of windows, so I have been working on making curtains. Since I’m not one to change decorations often in our home, it took me awhile to decide what I wanted to make and then do it. So far for the bedroom, I’ve made lacey sheer under-curtains, curtains with a two fabric border and now I’m working on valances. As the main curtain fabric is black with beautiful flowers all over I’ve been embroidering bunches of flowers at intervals on black fabric. Total of 16 motifs to embroider, each taking an hour to sew out assuming everything goes well!

I had read in one of my embroidery magazines that picking your embroidery thread by the color spots on the selvedge edge of fabric is a good way to be sure your threads match or coordinate with your project. I tried that and it has worked out well. It is hard for me to embroider the same thing over and over without changing so I, of course, ended up switching threads and thread types. This in turn has taught me more about tensions and directions of the spool of thread while sewing it out. I also learned that embroidering on black with lighter, finer weight threads didn’t give me the coverage that I wanted but I found by re-embroidering those areas in the same color before moving on, gave much better coverage and a brighter look to the embroidery.

One thing that I really wish my Janome 300E would do is signal when the bobbin thread is low. Unfortunately it doesn’t, so you find out that your bobbin thread is out when it runs out. When an embroidery motif takes over an hour to sew out, it is very hard to estimate if you will have enough bobbin thread. This may be an area if you are looking to purchase an embroidery machine that you check to see if it has a low bobbin indicator. I notice that Janome has come out with another embroidery only machine, but the ads don’t mention a low bobbin indicator. I’m not sure why they left off this essential item as many of their sewing machines have this technology.