It's aliiiiive! The embroidery machine is back from the dead.

About 5 years ago I bought myself a Pfaff 300e embroidery machine. It was an ex-display model and the lady at the shop kindly gave me a demonstration to see it working before taking it home. You can imagine my frustration when I brought it home and it worked once. And that was it. Once. And to add salt to the wound, the shop closed around a year later meaning I couldn't go in and ask for help.

I tried everything. I mean, everything in my limited knowledge of sewing machines at the time to fix it. I had lots of tantrums. Hundreds of snapped needles. To my frustration I kept getting an E14 error message - 'thread break'. I would re-thread and re-needle and nothing worked. Sadly to say, I gave up trying.

Fast forward 5 years. We're due to move house (hopefully) soon and I've been having a good clear-out. When I brought the dreaded machine downstairs, my husband saw it and said "oh, you're trying that again are you?". He obviously remembers the tantrums and tears well. I stated that if I couldn't get it to work this one last time I would sell it on - as it's effectively useless to me.

I set it up and attempted to sew a preset design. The same thing happened, the machine would do a few stitches, jam up, give me the error message and refuse to restart. When I re-threaded it would do the same and then snap the needle. I thought, it MUST be the tension... so I tried again, and again, and again, and again.

But thankfully I stayed calm this time.

I then noticed that the top thread wasn't picking up the bobbin thread. So I removed the baseplate and had a rummage around the bobbin area. I was using the correct bobbins and everything looked fine. So I slowly lowered the top needle and watched the mechanism move around in the bobbin and then spotted the issue. The hook in the bobbin mechanism wasn't quite in line so my needle was coming all the way down and back up without it catching the thread!

So I slowly adjusted the mechanism while lowering and raising the needle. I managed to get the mechanism right in the spot where the needle is at its lowest and it finally caught the thread. I quickly screwed it all back together and apprehensively tried again.

It only blinkin worked!

I am so so pleased that I've managed to fix it. I was loathe to sell something I paid a couple of hundred pounds for without even using it.

But that's not the end of my problems... oh no...

I want to create custom embroideries and stupidly, the only decent and reasonably priced programs are for Windows computers only. I'm a Mac user and there's not a single Windows machine in this house. So I'm stumped for the time being. Typical. The machine works now I can't use it to do what I wanted it to do in the first place!

I'm currently researching a program called Parallels that allows you to run Windows alongside your Mac OS so you effectively have a half/half machine. So far... it's looking quite expensive.

Bummer!