My sewing machine

Today, I want to introduce to you my sewing buddy, Brother sewing machine. This baby just came back from the service recently, and it's in a perrrrrfect condition and I'm loving it!   After the tune-up and cleaning, it's so much quieter and a lot smoother.   I now think that it was worth the wait and the money I paid for the maintenance.   I love you, baby!!

I handmade this sewing machine cover shown above some time ago, by lightly following this tutorial .  I love hexagon patchworks so I attached one to the cover ; )

And this is my Brother machine.  She does all sorts of general sewing with many many stitch functions and it also does simple machine embroidery.

Can you see the floral prints on both sides of the machine's monitor?  No, it didn't come like this originally, I simply used double sided tape to attach my favorite Liberty floral prints on to the face of the machine! 

It used to look like this when I first bought it (Mickey mouse with Disney logo).  See, our girls loved Disney characters when I purchased this machine a few years ago, but they eventually got over with them : (   I used to embroider their favorite Disney princesses on their clothings and bags often back then!

Also, I wanted to share with you about the tips on thread choices that I was informed by our local sewing machine shop.   According to the shop person, many of their customers' sewing machine problems (jamming, snagging, rough stitches, etc.) are a mere result of bad thread choices, and many of such problems can be avoided just by selecting the good quality threads. 

According to her, the worst type of threads are the cotton-wrapped polyester threads (e.g., Dual Duty brands), which can result in jamming, knotting, breaking, snagging and even flimsy finish.  (And these are the threads that I had been using for the past few years, which indeed resulted in threading problems of my machine). 

On the other hand, the best quality threads are the Mettler threads (both polyester and cotton threads).  

When I sew,  I guess I was paying too much attention to the fabric choices and I never really cared about the thread quality, so these suggestions were very surprising to me!! 

And before I go, let me show you the closeup of the hexagon patchwork that I sewed using the blanket stitch function of my sewing machine.

Happy sewing and hope you have a great weekend!