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Wow – I had not realized how long ago I got that embroidery machine. It has been nearly a year. I bought it on July 19, 2013.
I don’t know if I ever posted what happened with that, so I’ll post it now. When I received my Brother PE 500
I was angry and I knew if I bitched about it online people would go “that’s what you get for buying used! Shoulda saved up that extra money and bought a new one!” Because yeah, I should have done that and I felt stupid.
I calmly emailed Amazon and said that they should probably check that items like this actually work, as well as package them better. That it was frustrating because with the cost to get it fixed, I was going to end up spending as much as buying new would have cost. That I didn’t expect them to be able to do anything, and I wanted to keep it, but I just wanted to let them know.
They refunded me $100. This is why I love you, Amazon.
But the refunded it as amazon credit, because that’s what I had used to purchase it (I’d been saving up in amazon gift cards). So I couldn’t just take that and go to the repair shop. And having just bought the machine I didn’t have $100 in another form.
So I tried to fix it myself. I bought a new bobbin case from amazon, and tried to figure out the retiming thing. But I don’t know how to do that shit.
So I went searching for a repair shop. I looked at Brother’s site and found the closest listed service center. It was a 40 minute drive in good traffic (there’s pretty much never good traffic in Illinois) and they might have to send the machine away. Ugh, more chances for it to get damaged in the mail. But what else could I do? I put it aside until I had the time and money to drive 40+ minutes and get the damn thing repaired.
Welp at some point I thought of it again and I looked for more repair options. I found one that is only 3.6 miles from my house and said they would most likely be able to do the repair for less than $100. So I filed that away in my brain until I had $100 I could spend. Every time I had $100 I could potentially spend on that I decided to spend it on something else instead for whatever reason. Sometimes that was good reasons (Like I HAD to get a 3ds + Pokemon + Animal Crossing when I had the opportunity) but I don’t think they always were. A small part of it was that taking it to the repair shop meant admitting defeat, admitting that I can’t fix it so I have to pay someone else $100 to do it. But I knew that was silly because I was missing out on sales opportunities (as some people I know wanted to buy embroidered eyes and cutie marks for putting on amigurumi), spending more time doing needle felted eyes and details, and spending more money on special safety eyes than I really needed to, when a lot of those (amigurumi that have needle-felted eyes/details or special safety eyes) would be a lot better off with embroidered eyes or details. And there were some things I wanted to make that just weren’t feasible without the embroidery machine. So I had been thinking about it a lot.
Then earlier this week my husband decided he wanted some money to spend during the Steam summer sale so he sold a bunch of his Heroclix. He gave me a late birthday present of $100 and told me to “spend it wisely.” So I knew what I had to do.
Today I finally took the damn thing to the repair shop! I will have it back sometime next week. And I thought it had been a few months but I honestly had no idea it had almost been a year. Eek. Moral of the story: Me, don’t let feeling stupid and wanting other things keep me from doing things I should do! And clean off your damn desk. I had a hell of a time finding all the parts for the embroidery machine in various places on my desk -_-;
But yeah… starting next week I should have some embroidery-ey things! Embroidered eyes, cutie marks, and other details on some of my plushies, as well as sew-on-able eyes & cutie marks for those of you who make your own. I can’t wait 😀