It was my birthday last Wednesday. Much earlier in October, my present arrived. Of course I did not wait until my actual birthday. Come on.
I may have done a little dance when it arrived. Maybe I did. I was really looking forward to this in a big big way. Ask my husband and Julie how many times I spontaneously gushed about it at them before its arrival.
All excitement and eagerness aside, I most definitely read the instructions. Well, most of them.
This is some of the hardware. Totally non-threatening stuff. I was actually able to do 100% of the assembly all by myself, AND there were no mystery leftover hardware pieces at the end of assembly! I get the heebie geebies when there are mystery leftover hardware pieces when I am done assembling something. Especially something that is somehow supposed to house a baby, you know? That is why I read the instructions nowadays. Mostly.
So, the point of the Easy Quilter 3 is that, without spending thirty thousand dollars, and without even needing a fancy pants sewing machine like my Bernina, you can machine quilt by moving your regular old sewing machine machine, instead of trying to push and pull and shove a great big quilt under your comparatively-quite-small machine. Here is the rear track. The little wheels allow the machine to move left and right. There's another track parallel to this; and 2 more tracks perpendicular, that allow the machine to move forward and backward. You get a full range of motion.
And there's miss fancy pants Bernina sitting pretty up on the fully assembled rig, with her fancy pants stitch regulator, which cost me like three kidneys and a dog a couple of years back, and which I would realize, shortly after taking this photo, I didn't really really need. (I do like the stitch regulator for small quilts, still, though. And the Easy Quilter 3 isn't good for quilts with any dimension less than 48 inches.)
There are little handles (you can barely see one of them peeking out under the quilt) that I use to move the machine any-which-way over the quilt. And that quilt there is just a small crib-sized one, the top of which I had sitting around for YEARS, since before the kindergartener of the house was born...
And there. I quilted. This one's a bit imperfect, I hadn't yet gotten the hang of steering slowly while letting the machine run at top speed -- but I think I had the whole darn quilt quilted in some insanely small amount of time, like an hour tops. Crazy! When I was done, there was no neck pain, no shoulder pain, no back pain, no grousing at my family (hee). Seriously, it's so much faster and easier machine quilting this way. I have since quilted much bigger quilts, and much more evenly, but I have no photos of them yet. It is gift-making season, you know. You'll see them after the holidays.