New and exciting discovery.

 These photos below are OLD photos (I nearly fainted when I saw the year - 1990 printed in the corner of a couple of them - oh how time does fly!!!) that I dragged out of an album to see what I used to do in the 'dabbling with sewing' era of my life...which I must say was a fairly short era at the time.

I made this for a friend's little girl (who would be grown up now!) and when I look at it now I think 'how did I do that?'  The little dress lifted up and there were little undies and a tummy underneath and her hat was all puffy and 3 dimensional, and her plaits were made out of wool.

During the making of the last apron with the Koala and Cockatoo, and the trouble I had doing the applique stitch around curves and corners etc,  I had an urge to 'drop the feed dogs' and have a go at free motion machine embroidery...I didn't know anything about it or even know what it was called until a couple of weeks ago and when I tried it I couldn't work out exactly how to do it, or if I needed a special foot for it or none at all etc etc etc.

Next time I was in town and near our Sewing Machine Centre, I went in and inquired about machine embroidery and whether I needed a special foot etc and the very helpful lady there sold me a foot for the job and mentioned that it takes about 100 hours of practice to master the technique.  Undeterred, I couldn't wait until I was home so I could try it out for myself...(thinking 'no way' to the 100 hours). Sadly at that point, I couldn't even work out how to attach the foot ... let alone give the stitch a go!!!   At that time my machine was being very naughty during the making of the Cockatoo apron, so I had to go back to get my machine checked out and while I was there I asked to be shown how to put the foot on correctly.   
Yay, now I could play!!!   And OH what fun it is....like drawing with a sewing machine!