Produce and Pincushions

I hauled in another wagon load of produce yesterday morning:

I think I am close to what I need to make sauce and salsa. I’ve put about 20 gallon bags of tomatoes in the freezer, and what is here in the wagon will add another 6-8 bags. If any of my Kalispell peeps are in need of tomatoes, please come and help yourself to the bounty in my garden.

And still no frost on the horizon . . .

Some of these tomatoes—the Aunt Gladys and Mortgage Lifters, in particular—are well over a pound apiece.

The zucchini plants are just about spent. I think I am going to bring in the Georgia Roasters, the butttercups, and the Red Kuri squash this weekend. I might leave the butternuts out there until an actual frost. I have one very large, ripe Winter Luxury pumpkin, which is all I need for pie filling this year. In any case, garden work is on the schedule for Saturday.

After lunch, I played with the 700 PRO again. I made the pincushion project from Bernina’s We All Sew website. Bernina makes the embroidery files for these projects available for free. I have a USB drive that is traveling back and forth from my computer to the 700. I downloaded the files from the Bernina website, then inserted the USB drive into the 700. The machine read the embroidery file (.exp) from the USB drive. The designer of the embroidery file digitized the design and has broken it down into steps, so I stitched the first pass, removed the hoop as needed to add fabric, stitched the second step—wash, rinse, repeat.

Everything was done on the 700, including the final step of stitching the whole pincushion together with an opening for turning.

I would have finished this last night, but my container of crushed walnut shells has gone on walkabout. It isn’t where I had been keeping it, although I am sure I saw it about a week ago; I just can’t remember where. Hmmmm. It will resurface.

Right after I finished that project, Bernina posted a new one on the website:

Aren’t these Sawtooth Star patches adorable? And what a great use of little scraps. This one is next up in the embroidery queue.

The 700 is on a table in the room with my cutting table and my serger, so I can start a project and work on something else at the same time. Bernina also offers a phone stitchout app that works over wi-fi and allows you to keep an eye on a project remotely, but I am having trouble getting it to connect to the machine. The wi-fi signal in that room is a bit faint as it is at the opposite end of the house from the router.

Machine embroidery is fun, but I don’t think I am in danger of becoming obsessed with it. I like everything about sewing and want to continue to explore all of it.