Yes, an embroidery machine!

I got a very good deal at Huissteden in Barneveld. I went there with the assumption that I would be buying a Brother innov-is 750E, because that was the one within my budget (1000 euros), but I had already been eyeballing the 800E on the site. It came with a larger work area, but was also about 500 euros more expensive. So after a thorough demonstration of the 750E I asked about the 800E and was almost immediately sold because of the higher user friendliness of the newer machine. Bigger screen, in color, meaning more detailed editing and more preview options. The 750E made a blob out of the Urban Threads logo I brought with me on USB while the 800E actually showed the logo and the text and the intended colors. Also the assembling of the hoop went a lot smoother.

The man made me a great offer. I could get the machine for 1399 euros (listed price was 1439) and he would throw in for 50 euros on necessities (thread, spool thread, stabilizer, extra spools). In the end I got the machine for 1399 and about 70 euros of extras!

It took some effort to get the machine home (we went by train... why do we have a car? :-p ) and took it for a test run this morning with the above shown results. The heart was a surprise from Matthijs, it consists of a built in pattern of a heart and some characters. Obviously the B and M, but he also made the arrow out of V's, a hypen and an i. This machine lets you combine patterns and scale, rotate, flip and position stuff on the machine itself. It takes .pes files from an USB stick as well so now all patterns of Urban Threads are an option! I already did some of their patterns by hand embroidery, but a machine makes it so much faster to do with 850 stitches per minute max. I got a work area of 16x26 cm maximum.

We have yet to find the best set up for our 2 sewing machines (both operational again), serger and now this big beauty. The table is getting a bit crowded.

Melisse approves of the quality of the work, though we should've bought a bigger hoop to fit her in. :-p

Last Wednesday Matthijs came home late from dinner at his mom's place. I was in bed already but decided to come outside and see the 'falling stars' that were supposed to be visible this week (about 1 per minute, according to Matthijs). He wanted to try to take a photo. Didn't work out, but I saw 1 falling star. However, the more interesting thing was the surprise we got when we were only outside for about a minute. I saw something move fast from the corner of my eye and discovered it between the big waste bins we have outside; a hedgehog! Scuffling through our garden. So we took some pictures of that too (bad lighting, so mediocre results). It was so cute!

We have quite some snails, worms and frogs in our garden. The latter bringing a lot of entertainment to our cats (and exasperation to us when we find another beheaded corpse). I always wondered how the frogs got in our garden, and out for laying eggs since we have no pond in our garden (neither do our neighbours). But a hedgehog?! I read on the internet that hedgehogs are actually more common in gardens just outside the city than in actual countryside. I wonder if we have more than 1 in our block, since they need to mate some time, right? And it should be someone's offspring. So there must be more! So cute!