New Hobby

 

Reporting in today on my DH's new hobby. After many years of threatening to get one, he finally got a personal recommendation for a 3-D printer from a friend at work. He's very very excited about it which is all kinds of cute. It's a little bit smelly but not too terrible even with the heated up plastic.

The first thing he made was a scraper for the platten (the base that gets printed upon).  The second thing was this very cute bookmark.

Here it is at work holding my place in my latest read, the novel that the great TV series was based on, The Old Man.

It does a pretty great job, very flexible but strong.

His second effort was a holiday decoration of baby Yoda (aka Grogru) holding an ornament (an orb?). This is a character that I really really love, so it was nice that he picked that out for his second make. The stuff in the forefront is little bits of excess plastic that are left on the piece when it's done. Looks a bit like dry rice noodles. Unfortunately Lee-loo tried to eat it, so we'll have to be careful to keep it cleaned up.

There's all kinds of things he can make now, it's kind of endless. Let me know if you think of anything quilt-related he can make that would be useful. Hooray for new hobbies!

New Machine Day

It came! It really came! The sewing machine my DH surprised me with for my birthday arrived yesterday. 

A few months ago, I had told him how it was surprising to see Janome machines for sale on the Costco website, and we looked at some of them together. But then I dropped the whole thing, because I don't really truly need a new machine, mine had been working just fine. So it was a very lovely surprise.

 It was honestly a little weird that we ended up buying this without me sewing on it at a dealer, but in these times of COVID, I really didn't want to travel long distances, and sit in an indoor location for an hour with a salesperson breathing over my shoulder. (Just my imagination there on that part). I figured if it didn't work or I hated it, I could just take it back the next time we venture out to Costco.

I got it all set up very quickly and I started in on sewing the current project (a table runner natch) It's so quiet and beautiful and powerful. You don't even need a presser foot, the glowing green button will start and stop sewing. Not sure I'll use that, but hey, if I have a foot issue, that's nice to know. 

There's a whole extra inch of sewing space, so I can't wait to try and sew a bigger quilt.

The lighting is so fabulous and bright! Hooray for LED's!  I can actually see what I'm doing without a bunch of extra desk lamps.

Really amazing to see just how things have changed in 15 years.

Here are the feet that it came with (not pictured is the enormous buttonhole foot). I was slightly disappointed to learn that the new machine is a 9mm shank so none of my old feet will fit. Specifically my 1/4" foot. But there's a programmed stitch for exactly 1/4". That'll have to do for now.

I tried out some of the decorative stitches on an old pillow case. This isn't done with the correct threads, but I love seeing how this looks. And these words aren't even using the alphabet section.