What's New?!

I haven't done any actual sewing since my last post, but I have done some sewing adjacent activities.

I've been working on the Chalk and Notch Fringe dress. First was assembling the PDF. This is NOT a no-trim pattern. Boo. I spent an evening in front of the TV trimming the pages. Yes, I know I could do the "fold a corner thing" but actually trimming gave me an excuse to do something sew-y that didn't take much brain power. 

I left the TV to assemble the pages and sort out which pages/pieces I needed and which I didn't. Thankfully, I can use my office printers and not worry about ink or paper because there were a LOT of wasted pages, like 10-ish or so pages just for interfacing patterns and 5-6 that ended up being blank after turning off smaller size layers. I don't use/need interfacing patterns and I either just block fuse (preferred) or I use the actual pattern pieces. I certainly didn't need to print interfacing patterns for a bunch of different sizes but I found the "key" for which pages to print kind of fiddly and/or my brain just was not on full power. I generally print ALL the pages (thanks office!) and the sizes around my general base size and then I sort out which of them I actually need to put together. 

The fabric I'm planning to use is below. It's the Fabric Mart navy blue/dotty rayon from one of my last posts, which is now hanging over my chair since I pre-washed and pressed it.

The big (BIG!) sewing-adjacent activity (previewed on Instagram) was bringing in my Designer 1 for service (finally!) and also coming home with this. 

Meet my new toy! It's not a top of the line anymore but it's certainly at least 50 steps up from my Designer 1. It's weird (and not gonna lie, still a teeny bit annoying) to have to wait for my sewing machine to boot up. But it's also very cool to have a 21st Century sewing machine. This one better not die before I do. Not that my D1 is dead — I expect to pick her up in a couple of weeks.

I went into the store set on a Topaz 50. But there were a couple of quirks I just wasn't thrilled with. Silly, minor things but things that would bug me nonetheless. Don't get me wrong, the Topaz is an excellent machine and I almost came home with one but … I spent a good 2+ hours in the store (an independent fabric store slash Viking/Pfaff/Singer dealer) and the saleswomen were very patient with me, letting me go back and forth between machines and do whatever I wanted with no pressure, and in the end, the owner/saleswoman dropped the price of the Sapphire 85 considerably lower than what I have ever seen for a new OR used one and that pretty much sealed the deal for me. If you're ever in my area and need a new machine or sewing stuff, I highly recommend Fabric Warehouse in Lakeland. (Side note and probably one reason for the extra good price on my Sapphire — There's a new Designer Epic 3 coming out next month that's going to cost ~$25K. It's quite a machine from the previews but for that price, it had better drive me to the fabric store too.) 

Here's the internet on my new machine. Well, sort of. I haven't actually created my account yet.

Here's the regular stuff.

All of my Designer 1 feet and accessories are 100% compatible, including embroidery hoops, which is great news because I have about every foot made and it's nice to not have to re-buy them. But I knew that before heading to the store which was another reason I stuck with same "family," the main reason being I'm just a Viking girl.

But there are some Viking feet I didn't know about until I started looking at new machine stuff, including an "interchangeable" walking foot. It's just like a regular walking foot except there are specialty feet options, such as an edge joining foot, a 1/4" guide foot, and others, so you can dual feed AND precisely topstitch/edgestitch at the same time. Cool, right? I'm not sure how often I'll actually need it, but I was stupidly happy one was included with my new machine. My name is Debbie (hi Debbie!) and I have a machine/accessories problem. ;-) 

I'm hoping to get my dress cut out before the weekend so I can actually SEW for real on this new machine. I will not be shopping for a while.