My nemesis

Fri, 21 Jun 2024

In the course of working on the moth patterns, I loaded a 6x10 moth on my 8x8 machine. On purpose, because the sizes aren't strictly accurate - the Rosy Maple Moth, BeeZeeArt moths, and upcoming Hawk Moth are all to the same scale. This mostly means the Luna Moth maxes out the named hoop, but other moths can often fit in smaller hoops.

And this is true for the Rosy Maple: the 6x10 fits fine in the 8x8 hoop. This is almost true for the Hawk Moth, with one exception: the legs are larger on the Hawk Moth. (Yes, I'm a weirdo who researches these things. Rosy Maple's legs are really larger than they should be, but there are limits on turning and whatnot.) They came up calling for the 200x280 hoop, and rather than simply load up the Rosy Maple version and carry on, I thought, "You know what, I should get some practice with the big hoop."

You'll notice I haven't talked much about the newer machine, which theoretically upgraded me from 8x8 to 8x14. And that's because it has completely defeated me. I finally broke down and asked on a Janome forum on Facebook, because I was pretty sure that the machine has been out long enough that if no one can make the big hoop work, people would have noticed. And they have! I got some "I returned mine because of this" responses. But I also got some good notes on how to fix the issues I'm seeing (at least with the magnetic one), so I have some hopes.

Not that that affects the designs so much: 6x10 is smaller than 8x8 for square-ish designs, so I can test those in the usual hoop, and even when I could run the design up to the full 250% of 4x4, I often cut it off at 200% anyway just to avoid mylar-ballooning. But if I am going to make notebook covers for in-person vending, the big hoop will let me do Happy Planner Classic and composition-book sizes, and will let me single-hoop a lot of common smaller sizes, so it's important to me.

Anyway, if you're having trouble with the Janome MemoryCraft 550e 8x14 hoop "racking" (flexing corner-to-corner and letting the stabilizer sag) or the DIME magnetic hoop tracking poorly (as in the two directions of the runs in the featured pic), stay tuned: I am too, and I'll blog about getting them fixed. Or not fixed, as the case may be.