A Big Change in How I Will Do Machine Applique From Now On

I've been a charter subscriber to The Quilt Show.com since Alex Anderson and Ricky Timms started the online show. There is a newsletter that comes in my e-mail every few days and today's had a real eye opener.

There was a segment in the newsletter entitled "Bernina: Temporary Altered Memory" that had the following description: Okay, we thought this was a video on being over 50, but it's actually a way to get the applique stitch exactly where you want it. Needless to say, I was intrigued.

I have always been aware of the feature that let me alter stitches to my heart's content and then the machine would remember them until I turned the power switch off. This has been a consistent feature on all Bernina computerized machines since at least the first one that I bought, a 1230 model in 1991.

I use this feature mainly to toggle between two stitches when I do my straight stitch machine quilting, such as "in the ditch" or when stitching a diagonal grid, but didn't know that it could get my applique technique more precise.

Here's the link to the video: Bernina: Temporary Altered Memory

So I took a look at the video and then went directly to the machine to try it out. Nina was using a Bernina 440 and stitch #7. Since I am using the 830, I tried out a couple of stitches and decided on stitch 1331 which is in the "quilting" folder.

Since this applique stitch takes five straight stitches between "bites" into the applique piece, I adjusted the stitch length to .8mm rather than the 1.0 that Nina used for stitch #7 so that the bites would be closer together.

Using Nina's easy method enabled me to "nail" the corner exactly. This is a much more precise way to applique -- hooray!