Day 6 of the Stay at Home order for Raleigh
about Day 19 of "social distancing"
I haven't posted in a very long time. In today's world most of us are focused on the Pandemic that is making it's way through our world. It is a pretty scary world we are currently living in. My hope is that we all come out of this with a truer sense of who we are and revived focus to achieve our goals.
To begin with, I want to a talk about how my family is dealing with the situation. My hubby and I are both working from home. He is using our home office and I have set up in our guest room. And by setup, I mean that I have literally set up a longarm and my video equipment in the guest bedroom. My dad teaches online classes for a couple colleges so when they are visiting he needs a desk, so we already had a desk in the guest room, add a 7 foot longarm frame and I am pretty much set for being able to work.
We have fallen into a routine, we actually made breakfast, then we both go to our work spaces. We meet in the kitchen to make lunch, the back to work. About 6 we meet back in the kitchen to make dinner. Then we get to spend the evenings together. Tesa, our German Sheppard spends her day with me, Lincoln, our retriever stay were he can watch for hubby.
We are trying to fit some physical fitness in but spending some time in the home gym or moving mulch. Did you know that even when non essential business are shut down, you can get a mulch delivery... strange, but true. We had a truck load dumped on our driveway on Monday. Kind of nice to have some outside work to do.
The rest of the local family is also doing well. We get regular updates on all our family members and are trying to help each other out with no personal contact. We do things like deliver lettuce and masks to their front doors and then yell hello from 20 feet away when the come out to get it. I think it may the hardest on the kids.
Professionally, have been doing Facebook Live posts on the technical side of Quilt Path. Yesterday I was thinking about the mask file that Handiquilter put up on their website and thought, couldn't I just sew the elastic in on the longarm, so I created a design that lets me do that. It is kind of like doing an "in the hoop" project on an embroidery machine. Because this is something that most of us have not done on a longarm, I will be shooting a video on how to do this.
There are definitely pros to the HQ file, it is quick on the longarm, you can just let the longarm forward through the jump stitches and it doesn't really need you to interface with it. Con is that you need to do a lot more off the longarm. The way I came up with has the Pro that most of the work is done on the longarm, all you need to do is pleat the sides. The con is that it takes longer on the longarm that HQs does. Both ways are quicker for me then doing the masks on my domestic sewing machine. Once I get the documentation done I will post it and the files up here. I will even include other formats so that you can try it if you own a different computer system.
Hoping you all stay safe and healthy!
Angela
