Xquisit!

No, this is not just my usual bad spelling, this is the name of my incredible new sewing machine. Well, actually it's not that new, I've had it since September but I've only just about got the hang of all the things it can do, cos one advantage of having IV drugs for 2 weeks is that you can do a hell of a lot of reading so I finally bothered to read the instruction manual properly..... well it is 220 pages of computer-speak that means I needed to spend most of my time looking things up in the glossary. It is a rather large brute, here it is with the embroidery unit attached.

Despite its sheer size and weight it is surprisingly easy to use (once you've read the manual!) as its got a touch screen, that you can see lit up in the picture, and its just a matter of pressing the relevant buttons. It can do practially anything, like threading itself, refilling the bobbin when it runs out, even if you are in the middle of a design it will restart itself in exactly the right place, and you can upload pictures into the included Xpressive programe (are we seeing a spelling pattern here??) and digitze it, then bung it on a smart media card, bung that into the machine and away it goes! About the only thing it can't do is make the tea whilst its at it. As if all those things were not enough it can do all the normal things that sewing machines can do to and about 10 times faster!!!!-sorry I'll stop waxing rhapsodic now. However, I am now going embroidery crazy and my latest effort is this rather fun spider flower that only took 24 minutes to sew (and thats not at full speed as when its going flat out its quite scary!)




















I've also done these rather nice butterflies as well-



















To see some more examples goto http://www.rosalindevans.com/ or drop me a line if you've got some ideas for me to go nuts on!