My dear friend Kathy (http://www.kathinon.blogspot.com/) thinks I am obsessed with sewing machines. She is wrong. I am not obsessed, I am totally crazy about sewing machines. :-)

Shelley http://shelleysgardenblog.blogspot.com/ has asked I do a blog on this. Where do I start?

I learned sewing with my mother. She had an old Singer. I enjoyed sewing a lot. I remember a specific day, when I came back from School, Sears delivered a brand new sewing machine in its brand new own sewing cabinet. Wow! It was at the end of the 1970s and I was a young teenager.

I looked at it and it seemed so MODERN! It had cams, lots of stitches, pretty colors on the buttons... and an instruction book. My parent went for a nap right after dinner and I dared sit in front of this sophisticated new comer and tried it. It sounded so good, almost like music. I used a pale blue fabric with a bright color thread and went on and on trying all the stitches, all the cams, reading, trying, reading more, trying more... This was happiness. To this date, my 85 years old mother still has this machine and still has that blue fabric with all the stitches. Good memories.

Years later, I went to University and stopped sewing and was about to get married. Then one good summer (1987), when I was working in Montréal, I went shopping at Eaton and they had tables full of used sewing machines. I saw a sewing machine that was almost like my mom's. I instantly fell in love. Same brand, same year, more stitches and more cams... but to me it was the same and it instantly brought good memories. The shopping for fabric and patterns with my mom, her teachine me... Here is a picture of my first own sewing machine. Don't you think it is nice!

A few years later (1993) I bought my first serger. A used 4-thread Janome serger. Weeks later, my older sister, who is also passionate about sewing machine called me. She had an opportunity to buy a 5-thread Singer serger at a very very good price ($500). I knew that Janome was a better brand that Singer at the time but still decided to go for the 5-thread serger. I sold my 4-thread Janome (for the same price I had paid) the following day and that was it.

I enjoyed sewing and playing with the machines. I used every feet I had, I bought many more. I made my first quilt. I just love sewing! Years went by. I became a mother of two. Sewed for the children, for the home, got divorced. When my children got older (7-9 years old), I did a few more quilts, then met my boyfriend who has two children. We were six in the house. This is quite an accomplishment! I will tell you more about it in another blog.

Being such a large family, I needed to take care of myself, do something I liked. And this is how I got into quilting some more. Every year I receive a bonus ($) from work. I have made a decision to always use this money for something that pleases me. What pleases me is sewing.

I went to a quilt show and saw a beautiful janome 6500p. Why not! I could not find a stippling foot for my Kenmore and found my beloved sewing machine was limiting me in my quilting. The Janome had a longer arm than what I was used to, a stippling and a walking foot. OK I bought it. I at the time owned 2 machine and 1 serger.

My daughter and my step son wanted to learn to sew. I bought them each a used sewing machine. Simple machine but it did what it was suppose to do! We had 4 machines and 1 serger.

... a lot more to come! Suite la prochaine fois!