Waiting is over, finally.

It should have happened Thursday. At least that was the original day set up for my tutorial on my new Bernina 820. On short notice (Thursday morning) that got pushed back another day, and it all happened on Friday afternoon. Luckily my husband was able to push around all his appointments, make time to take care of my son when he returned home from school, so I could take off.

The Bernina expert, Frau Popp, had come to my dealer to make all the arrangements for him to be re-listed as official Bernina-dealer, and I got my personal introduction to the machine from her. Very nicely she ‘took me by the hand’ and virtually walked me through every single step and possibility that the machine offers. The whole event took over two hours, and in the end I thought I had it all down safely.

Of course that wasn’t quite true as I found out today when I unpacked and tried my hand at it on my own. It is a sewing computer, and computers do take getting used to at first.

Unpacking...

Now how did you have to thread that bobbin which comes without a bobbin case? Which icon on the touchscreen is for what? Wasn’t there a feature where you could do this magnificent thing...? I practised threading the top thread – closely watched by my 7-year-old son who kept giving wise comments and nagging me when could he try it out by himself – and tried out quite a number of the fancy stitches that come along with this edition, although it does not have the embroidery feature that the 830 has.

Only a small selection of the many fancy stitches.

But the best of it all is the BSR-foot. BSR stands for Bernina Stitch Regulator, and is a wonderful little item that regulates the stitch length of your quilting stitches because an integrated sensor (with an extra connection to the computer part) detects the speed of movement of the fabric and adapts the speed of stitching accordingly. And it seems to work quite nicely – these are stitches of an absolute beginner on the machine, executed this afternoon:

We still need to get to know each other better, but I am very positive that this is going to turn into a good relationship!