Our new specials are on the website and the newsletter is out

Our new newsletter is finally out so check your emails. Our new specials are up and we anticipate a lot of our customers taking advantage of these new specials.

Happy shopping!

Here is a pictures of a quilter by the name of Vivian C. who lives in Winnipeg. Vivian (on the left) does charity quilts for Manitoba Prairie Quilters as well as many of the other ladies in the group, here she is getting several bags of Marathon cotton thread to use in the charity quilts. The lady on the right is Lea F and she's going to be the next President of the guild (well after the election that is). I think we caught Vivian a little by surprise as she wasn't expecting this. Being a member of the guild myself and being the current photographer, I just happened to have my camera with me.

Stay tuned!

Now that the two April shows are done, we're working hard on the newsletter and specials. We're hoping to get this out to you within the next 10 days (hopefully sooner).

Everyone is so quiet, what are you all working on? So stay tuned, you should be getting our newsletter soon.

Shows shows and more shows

We've had a busy month of April with not one but two shows, one was Quilt Reflections 2008 in Winnipeg as well as the Creativ Festival in Toronto. The first picture is of our shipper Larry getting things ready for the shows.

The second picture is at Quilt Reflections 2008. You can see Michele talking to a customer.

As several of our customers have asked us, we've decided to attend the Creative Stitches & Crafting Sept. 26 & 27, 2008 Calgary Stampede, Calgary AB. See you there!

We've also decided to attend the Fall Creativ Festival in Toronto from October 17th to the 19th. If you can make either one of these shows we'd love to meet you.

Please don't forget to check out our website as we update our pages regularly and we've added several new products such as MyThreadBox and black cutaway stabilizer not to mention four fabulous metallics.

Something new and exciting

As an embroiderer using Marathon threads, I can honestly say that it's annoying to manually convert colour charts when I buy from designers. Why they don't include our fine thread, I don't know. Yesterday I was mentioning this to Michele so she decided to do something about it.

As of mid-April we'll be carrying a product called My Thread Box and what this program does is convert your thread colours from other thread brands to Marathon or any other brand but I ask you, why would you want to buy another brand when you have Marathon threads? (grin). I've been using Marathon Threads since I got my first embroidery machine some 5 years ago and I haven't looked back.

Needless to say that this just made my day! No more wasting my time to convert. A program will do all of that for me.

So if you're on the fence about buying Marathon embroidery threads because designers don't put our thread colours, worry no more, this software will help you out.

Linda

Tip on metallic thread

I thought I'd blog about "my" results when working with Marathon metallic threads. Are you experiencing thread breakage?

I got different results depending on which needle I was using for which project. Lately, I've been working with FSL (Free Standing Lace) and I decided to try it with metallics.. I have to say that I was a little apprehensive about it at first. Guess what, it worked! For the projects that I was working on, I found that I got better results with a bigger needle. I tried a metallic size 11 needle and got good results but I decided to test the same project with a size 12 needle as well as a size 14 (sharp needles) and I found that for my projects, I got better results with a size 14 needle. My choice of stabilizer was H2o Gone and it worked great. Now I'm totally addicted to FSL. If you're reading this and have some great sites for FSL, please drop us a line.

Once my project was done, I unhooped it and trimmed it and then ran it under warm water and the stabilizer disappeared almost like magic.

So if you're having thread breakage, my suggestion would be to change your needle to a bigger size and see what happens.

Make sure that your needle is not dull. We recommend changing your needle every 8 hours of sewing on regular sewing projects and after 100,000 stitches on machine embroidery projects.

If you're in the beginning stages of machine embroidery and looking for a great book on it, we recommend Creative Beginnings in Machine Embroidery by Patty Albin which we just happen have in stock. I've been embroidering for 4 years and I think this book is really good. In fact I just bought a copy for myself.

Linda

Hello Hello

We're very pleased to see that people are reading our blog! Keep your suggestions coming, we appreciate them.

We are reading all the comments. If you have any "tips" or projects that you'd like to share with us and would like to see them on our blog, please email us at mail@marathonthreadscanada.com

Michele and Linda