A Warm Welcome..

Introducing my new JUKI!

Turns out, the gal I purchased the machine from is quite an accomplished art quilter! Rickie is a Blogger, and I really enjoyed seeing many of her masterpieces and works in progress. She does a lot of thread painting on canvas that she has first painted with oils. I found it quite inspiring and look forward to trying out some art quilting with my new-to-me machine!

 

My husband and I did not bring our dining set when we made the long move to Vegas, and we chose not to purchase one. Instead, our dining area is a kind of lounge area and gets more use this way. Point is, I really have no place to set this up.

 

For now, it is on a wobbly old card table...

I went to quite a few garage sales Saturday in search of something sturdier, but only brought home a $1 office chair. Since the chair I sit on at my Bernina is cornered in there, and has to be lifted to more, I thought this was worth a buck. It was in super bad nic, in fact they probably thought I was nuts when I offered the buck, so I spent several hours yesterday stripping it down and re-covering it with some purple denim. Funny, now that I see the photo, it is the brightest thing in the room!

 

Rickie spent some time with me showing me the ropes, and although it seems she has spent many hours at this machine, and it has some wear, she gave me a great price I could not pass up :-)

 

I have not had much time to play with it yet. I gave it a cleaning last night and made a few stitches before bed.

It is way faster than I am used to, and it has a couple functions I am not used to. (Twice I have cut the threads by stepping on the thread cutter button instead of the power on the foot pedal!). Today I will play with some different threads and tension a bit. When using the walking foot last night, I noticed the bottom seems to gather a bit, so I need to figure out what is causing that..

(Underside)

 

I checked the bobbin tension with the dangly trick and it seems OK. The feed dogs seem quite high to me; maybe there is an adjustment I can make. And the bobbin thread was lighter weight than the top thread. I only have sz90 needles for it so far, so I have not tried any Aurifil or 50wt yet.

 

 

On another happy note, our heat wave has broken, and some wind and cloudage has kicked in. Course this photo is three hours ago, and it now reads 102 outside, but yesterday at this time it was over 110 degrees. Hot and sticky, even for me. Visibility is low too, and I could only see a surreal kind of outline of The Strip this morning.