I'd never worked up the guts to test any of the embroidery stitches on my (Nanna's) old Bernina Record 530-2. It has them available, staring me in the face every time I use the machine, but I wasn't confident in my ability to make it... y'know... work.
I took her in recently for a general tune-up at my LQS and the technician tested out all of the stitches as part of the process. He showed me how I would need to set all of the switches to make the magic happen and warned me not to mess with one in particular because the spring was too stiff to... well, yeah. No replacement parts for this old lady.
Because I had to finish up a few pet rat hammocks for a friend of mine, I decided to be silly and test out an embroidery stitch around the outside of the hammock. Normally I would just straight stitch around to close the opening made when I flip it inside-out. I think it turned out pretty! The stitch is shorter and denser in the beginning where I was trying to figure out a few settings, and also where the hammock jumps from two layers to four in closing the opening.
Sure it's going to get chewed on eventually, but that's fine! It was a fun practice.
This is a flat hammock made with flannel and a fleece back. Grommets let it hang for critters to snooze in.
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Close-up of the embroidery stitch. I made it slightly looser because it's going to get chewed on anyway and was taking a while.
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An example of a hammock in action. I made this one for the same person about a year ago.
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