My New Longarm!

Exciting news — my “garage studio” update and our guest room revamp are both essentially complete, and I have a new longarm to play with over the holidays!

When I last posted in October, we still had a bunch of stuff in the garage to get rid of, and the guest room still had a longarm but no bed. On the garage front, I was able to get rid of a lot of kid stuff (mainly outgrown bikes and scooters) by posting them in a NASA-associated parents’ group, found a taker for some old Ikea bookcases on NextDoor, and utilized a couple rounds of weekly heavy trash pickup to get rid of other junk.

In early November, I went to Quilt Festival and spent a lot of time talking to both Innova and Handi Quilter. I also wanted to try APQS but they didn’t have a booth this year, so the next day I made the cross-town journey to the local dealer in Spring to try out those machines. Ultimately I chose to go with APQS, and ordered a new 26″ Millie! It shipped quickly, and my new friends at Double E Quilting came down to install it right before Thanksgiving.

(I’m getting a computer system for this longarm as well, but it’s a 10-12 week wait so it won’t be here till February or March. But I’m excited about that! So many new things to learn.)

(Also there is still some garage cleanup/organization left to do even now, but since the machine shipped so quickly we worked fast to get it ready “enough,” including sweeping and mopping the floor — there was so much dust and dirt that had accumulated over the years. Yuck.)

Once I had ordered the new machine, I posted my old Handi Quilter Avante for sale on Facebook, and happily had several people interested in the machine. Ultimately I ended up selling it to a fellow Houston MQG guild member. She came down to test it out the weekend before Thanksgiving, which allowed me to disassemble it and move it out of the guest room before Jose’s family arrived for the holiday. We didn’t have our updated guest room completely ready for them, but at least the longarm was gone, and they were comfortable enough on a king size air mattress.

But now everything is set up! I did some practice on the machine, and then I let my friend Jenn come over to finish a holiday quilt — the first official finish on the Millie! Jenn and I did her quilt with the garage door wide open, and I repeated that again yesterday when loading a baby size version of my Ribbons quilt that I made a year ago. (I’m planning to try a hand-guided pantograph for the first time, and this quilt top is a good low-stakes practice piece.)

Throughout this process, I’ve been so focused on making sure the garage can be kept cool and dry enough through a Houston summer that I didn’t even consider that I’d be able to work out there with the door open in the winter. I’ll only be able to do this from November through March or April, but it’s so pleasant to be semi-outside enjoying the daylight and cool breeze while quilting!

And just to wrap up the full story, here’s a photo of our guest room yesterday. (So different than it looked only a few months ago!) We ordered a sit/stand desk and extendable daybed from Ikea, and constructed both over the last couple weeks. This will be Jose’s workspace for his day job, since he works remotely full-time. He’ll keep his hobby and gaming space downstairs, but he’s already LOVING having a dedicated space in a quiet part of the house for his workday.

And then of course this will double as a guest space for the few weeks a year we need that. The daybed will stay in its single, couch-like configuration most of the time, but we have it extended into the double bed configuration at the moment to let the new mattresses air out and fluff up from being vacuum-packed. I’ve read that these Ikea mattresses are not super comfy, so I do plan to get a mattress topper that can be added to the double bed setup when needed.

It may have taken several months, but it’s so satisfying to have this garage + guest room transformation complete. I think we’re going to enjoy it for years to come!