Sand and Sunshine

The new sewing machine is here!  It arrived in the clearly not a sewing machine box that you see Sunny smelling in the picture below.  I felt so lucky when I saw the delivery truck pull up.  Knowing it was heavy I even threw the door open wide and the delivery man was able to place it on our tile entry instead of the wet concrete.  I'm not sure he's allowed to do that, but I found it especially nice.

 Every time I look at it, I think if the Little Elna is little this is a beast!  If a standard mechanical sewing machine is 30% plastic this one is less than 5%.  As a special added bonus to it's 39 or so pounds is that the feet are suction cups.  I'm not talking about those crappy ones they stick on every cheap bathroom accessory, now these are hefty and when you pick up the machine there is an extra pop before they give way and allow you to take the full weight of the machine.  That makes for added fun getting the machine positioned but should really help it stay put in the frame.

Don't sew your leaders!  :-)

So here it is all loaded on the frame.  I plan to practice a bit with the machine unthreaded today so we'll see how that goes.  My DH is always delighted by new mechanical toys (clearly regardless of their nature) and stitched the first row of stitches claiming it was much much smoother on the carriage than he'd thought it would be, and that's after how many weeks of sliding the empty carriage.

So what do I have here?  The red thing on the black arm is the velcro for the stitch regulator, only time will tell if I like that more or less then the standard frame's controls.  Of course it's an Inspira Frame, with a Janome 1600P on it.  This is one of the three machines that will work seamlessly with the Inspira Frame.  I'm using purple fabric to practice on with pink serger thread because I heard the Janome 1600P likes that.  I think I'll be able to see my stitches easily this way and thought it would be prettier than plain muslin.

What else?  Oh yes when I put the machine into the frame, yes I weakling me did it, against even my own forethought and better judgement, but I was so excited; I had trouble with it hitting one of the bars, but of course when DH got home he automatically raised the entire bar system and leveled it so it's perfect now.

Stitchinpenny expressed some concern over the seemingly missing back for Tropical Waves, and I would actually like to say that I'm working on it, I seam ripped out all the Amy Butler fabric, and picked out all the loose little threads before the excitement really started happening here.