Nancy has a very spiffy embroidery machine. Very spiffy. She has done TONS of embroidered designs for almost everyone she has come in contact with.

You should see my spiffy monogrammed underwear.

Or not.

At any rate, we knew that moving to a high humidity, high dust/dirt area would eventually cause the machine to malfunction.

That day came.

We also knew that probably finding a certified, authorized Baby Lock Ellisimo repair place would be impossible.

We were wrong. (We think, time will tell.)

Her machine didn’t die completely. It just wouldn’t do the embroidery patterns exactly as designed. The machine is super automated… upload the design via a USB stick and punch a few buttons and the machine automagically does the embroidery.

It’s very cool to watch.

The malfunction was that the machine would read the design OK, then start up and run, but eventually the embroidery design would be out of register.

We took the machine apart many times and used canned air to clean all the sensors we could see. Surprisingly, the inside was dust and dirt free.

We tried using the factory-installed designs with the same result.

After eliminating all the variables I could think of:

• thread
• fabric
• stabilizer
• different size hoops

we came to the conclusion that this problem needed an expert’s touch. We weighed the possibility of Nancy lugging the huge machine back to the “old country” when she next visits.

Not a viable option.

Through my trust internet searching skills, I found a couple places in the large city up the road that services identical Brother Quattro machines!

Pat, our go-to person for translating purposes, gave LaBobina.cr a call to explain the problem. We were told to schlep the machine to Alajuela and they would diagnose while we waited.

What a surprise.

First, that we found the place, and second that it was huge and well stocked – both machines and parts! It was amazing to walk into this shop and see rows and rows and rows of embroidery machines.

In the back was a repair section with TWO guys working on machines.

We new we were in good hands.

Nancy wrote the details our visit here.

In a nutshell, the guy watched the machine sew and explained the problem to Pat (that we had on speaker-phone.)

By the way, we drew a crowd of employees when Nancy fired up the machine to demonstrate the glitch. La maquina grande! 

He says when machines act like this they have a virus!

Normally, I wouldn’t be pleased with such a diagnosis, but today I’ll take it. If they have an anti-virus program for embroidery machines, it should be easy-peasy to get Nancy back in stitches.

She’s not happy now. If mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy! But she left La Bobina confident that everything will be right with the world soon.