Hooray!  After all this time, my Handi Quilter Fusion 24 longarm quilting machine and frame is up and running!  I’m so excited to have it back again.

If you remember, last year a lot of the frame parts went missing while it was being shipped.

The main parts that were missing were two of the frame tables. I contacted Handi Quilter in the USA, who do not do spare parts for the frames.  They told me that it would be best to get a complere new frame, but the cost was very high but that was that and they offered nothing else.  I felt very exhausted drained with the whole business by then and, finally, we decided that we would have to sort out the mess myself.

I hunted around for a metal worker who could make the missing parts for ages, without much success, and I’d almost given up on it as everyone said it was too complicated to make.  In April I went to some amazing art quilting classes in Grenaa run by Maria Vetter Christiansen (check her out at http://www.tekstil-kunst.dk).  She’s a very talented artist and quilter.  Quite by chance, I mentioned our frame problem to her: imagine my surprise when she said that her husband makes specialist parts for various industires and has a workshop who could easily make the missing parts.  Next day, I delivered the one part that arrived (two were missing) and a few weeks later, Maria’s husband delivered the two missing sections to us – perfectly flat, perfectly square, with all the holes drilled in the exact places and with all the correct threads welded in they went together perfectly. And after hunting down replacement screws etc, I now have my HQ Fusion 24 working again.  I’m so very pleased: at one point I thought that it would never work again and I was on the point of giving up altogether and selling  it.

I made a giant king size quilt and used it to practice loading and quilting, happily I remembered all I had learned last year.

I choose a nice swirly pantograph from www.urbanelementz.com and set to it, it was a bit scary quilting such a big quilt  after a years break from quilting on my longarm but I just took it slowly, it took me 2 full days!

Here’s the finished quilt.