Sneak Peaks: GO! Bloom at Bernina University

Bernina University (BU) is being held this week near the River Walk in San Antonio, Texas.  Bernina Dealers from all over the US will be attending, taking classes and learning new techniques and about new products.  Various vendors will also have booths showing off their new products too!  I did some searching to see what I could find out, but I think many of us will just have to wait for our Bernina Dealers to return and hear from them on what they've learned.  But I did find out a few things that I can share:

The very talented Amanda Whitlach will be teaching several classes, including a Creative Cutwork class at BU.  Cutwork is growing in popularity and I expect to see more spectacular machine embroidery cutwork projects made as a result of this Bernina tool.

Alex Veronelli will be in Aurifil's booth at BU, showing all their beautiful threads.

Sarah Vedeler will have her first vendor booth at BU and I'm confident it will be displayed with her award winning quilts and other spectacular projects.  Her lated GO! Bloom machine embroidery designs will also be showcased.

The GO! Bloom design collection comes with 14 individual designs that work well with 3 AccuQuilt dies (GO! Daisy, GO! Tulip, and GO! Fun Flower), on either the AccuQuilt GO! or GO! Baby. 

The collection comes with illustrated instructions to make the GO! Bloom Quilt, which measures 40"x40".

And the collection includes instructions to make four pillow tops that are shown on the cover of this collection.

 It is a very reasonably priced machine embroidery design collection, with a retail price of $45.  Plus, in July, there is a 20% discount for those that are Signed up for Sarah's newsletter and use a special code when purchasing from her site.  Click here to sign up for her newsletter.

GO! Bloom – 14 individual designs using 3 AccuQuilt GO! Baby dies. In addition, illustrated instructions to make the quilt shown on the cover, and the four pillow tops also shown on the cover.

Formats included: ART4, ART6, DST, EXP, HUS, PCS, PES, JEF, VP3, XXX.

Sarah's designs stitch out beautifully.  They really look great with Aurifil thread.  But, I'll admit I used Isacord.  And, while it works, I have come to learn that Aurifil really does stitch out nicer than Isacord.  I had more thread breakage and more lint using Isacord than on projects that I've used Aurifil with. 

Machine embroidery applique' has historically required that pieces of fabric be manually cut individually.  And, as such, you can stitch this embroidery design out without the use of an AccuQuilt.  Actually, I don't have the GO! Tulip or GO! Fun Flower dies so I did use the old fashioned manually cutting method.  While Sarah's machine embroidery designs stitch out beautifully, like many of us, my manual cutting is just not as accurate as AccuQuilt's die cuts.  If you look closely you can see where my cutting was off and I have a little fabric showing past where a design stitched out. 

Clearly, if I had had the AccuQuilt dies this project would have been faster and far more accurate than with my manual cut of the applique pieces.  Definitely a sign that machine embroidery applique is so much better when done with an AccuQuilt, and I hope you agree too!

Sarah will be teaching a two day machine embroidery class, at Road to California 2012, that the class project is the GO! Bloom quilt.  Sarah may view I'm staulking her, but I had so much fun at a prior class with Sarah I have signed up to take her class at Road in 2012 and looking forward to it.  If you are interested, I do hope you'll check it out and come join us too.

The possibilities with Sarah's GO! Bloom, AccuQuilt and Aurifil are endless!  Yes, they definitely help your creativity bloom!