My maternal grandmother whiled away her hours pumping an ancient sewing machine's foot treadle. (Her labors may have been other than millinery.) Mother had an electric Singer and sporadically worked herself into a hemming frenzy. New World girls drowned in busy work, created sane children, and descended into tranks plus booze and soap operas in their menopausal 40s. The future has arrived! (Prozac, Paxil, and Welbutrin, too. Clonazepam when things get on you.)
Today you can do CAD/CAM on your PC virtual sewing machine or grab a digitized photo. Download to your super-twisted nematic LCD display Bernina Artista 200E or stick in a PCMCIA FlashRAM card. Have 20 minutes of silicon bang out what would otherwise be 10,000 hours of 256-color hand embroidery or cross-stitch as you sip a mocha latte.
If you sell a kidney to purchase the Pfaff Creative 2140, you still get a multicolor touch sensitive LCD screen, but it is bigger. Add 160 decorative and 500 firmware stitches, 2000 embroidery motifs, and real time webcam image capture. Exploit your stud muffin, and before somebody can say "like, love, lust, laundry" have a skirt embroidered with his full-color outstanding efforts. (Does your man rate above the knee or below?) A Catholic family conceivably could have the kids run in a circle and perform animation.
My sweetie Linda and I did the 2003 Orange County Fair. We yearned to view a Brobdingnagian transparent refrigerator holding massive Michelangelean cows carved from butter, margarine, frozen low-fat yogurt, tofu, and Miracle Whip-epoxy composite. Alas, not this year. We walked the other air-conditioned venue. Women and men with thin moustaches whispered into headset microphones. Boomingly extolled were the virtues of stainless steel turbo nose hair clippers and 500-gallon deep fat fryers. "Why sweat over a barbecue when you can Dixie fry an entire steer all at once!"
I won the PS 208 fifth grade sewing bee. Imagine my elation when we espied four ladies generating more embroidered acreage than an entire village of enslaved Muslim children with blood running down their slim supple wrists.
I asked, "Will it illuminate hamsters like a Medieval manuscript? Does it have a Panic Button?"
The Bernina representative replied, "If you purchase the platen extension add ferrets, marmots, and kinkajous. The Panic Button is right here..." It looked friendly, too, and had a baby lock.
I hold in my hand a CDROM that could design and knit a Space Shuttle out of refractory fiber, with raised roses and bluebirds, if your computer has a big enough hard drive. It will create and play a movie showing your Bernina sewing cyberspace with your artistic vision, plus slo-mo and fastplay options. Network TV is passe.
I'd like to see a DOOM WAD replacing the chainsaw with a Bernina. When those huge naked pink things come at you... Turbo European buttonhole them to Hell! If you had a Pfaff you would not need the pistol, shotgun, chain gun, missile launcher, or BFG 9000 either. That marvel does lace, Richelieu, and cutwork - including metallic threads - on organza, silk, chiffon, tulle...
Where do we go from here? For little more than a cool kilobuck (no sales tax if ordered on-line) Pfaff will sell you a rubbed wooden cabinet bursting with spools of thread covering the whole CIE color chart, plus metallics, held in carved niches. You can add one lockable drawer filled with colors God never intended! Oh those Swiss, including mind-expanding chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann (then Abbie Hoffman and Judge Julius Hoffman, but Tales of Hoffmann is a different nutcracker).
There is a dark side. These two miracles of our modern age and historic low interest rate extended financing use Windows CE as their operating systems. A gigabyte of SDRAM to boot a quad processor Intel Pentium 3 GHz motherboard with 800 MHz bus to display a low-res question mark on a small LCD screen was very Microsoft. There were denials on all sides when I asked about the Blue Screen of Death. Right.
An Intel i7 980 with 12 GB of DR3 1600 RAM update in 64-bit Wincrap7 adds six colors to the screen
My honey and I departed, loaded with glossy brochures and CDROMS, enjoying dehumidified arctic air rushing in to fill voids revealed after double aisles of hot air ascended from their vendors. I had twice noted a curious powered serial port amidst the various digital appurtenances. I suspect a lady engineer had been on the design team and she knew what granny's foot treadle was all about. I would lead an embroidered life forevermore if only I could locate the third party hardware vendor.
My woman gave me her "I know what you are thinking" glance. Both Bernina Artista 200E and Pfaff Creative 2140 were outside the household budgetary envelope. Linda doesn't sew, but she sure can cook!