Nine seams later ...

Having got my machine on Saturday, I was really excited to finally get to try it today.  At last by the afternoon I'd done everything everyone needed and my time was almost my own (except for a little supervision of Joe's lessons).

First up was mastering how to wind a bobbin and then thread it all up! You get instructions, but I found them a bit confusing in places. However, I found a video on you tube of my machine being threaded!  Amazingly, even though it was in Russian and I couldn't understand a word, the video was really helpful and I soon had a threaded machine sat waiting for me!  :)

Total newbie to this that I am, I then got a scrap of material and started to try to sew. I soon discovered it was a good idea to set the stitch pattern I wanted to try, so the poor machine had an idea of what was expected of it.
Clueless as I am, I couldn't follow the instruction book on it's own, so back to my Russian video, I just copied what they did and hoped for the best.

It worked!!

I sewed 2 seams on the scrap material and impatiently decided to jump in and attempt a cushion cover!
HA!
Quite a few mistakes followed.

I didn't cut the material completely straight. I marked it out in air erasable pen and it erased within 2 minutes! Mid cut! EEK!!!!
I also didn't realise what the grid by the needle tells me, until half way round, mid seam when I suddenly worked out, that I could use it to do the size of seam I wanted.

Many mistakes and realisations later, I was the 'not exactly proud, but amazed it looked even vaguely like it should' owner of an envelope cushion cover!

The front:  As you can see, I hadn't even thought about centering the pattern or anything like that.

The back: Due to bad cutting out and not working out how to judge seam sizes until half way through, the envelope isn't as good as it would be.  The cushion isn't exactly the right size to what I was aiming for either.

But considering I am totally clueless and am just learning as I go along ... it's not a bad result after having only sewn a total of 9 seams on my own. 

I think I might need to research an easier way of marking and cutting out fabric more accurately.
Oh and to practice getting seams a uniform size using the guide by the needle.

Now back to the Lilac rose!

:)