Recently, I got another Amazon gift certificate for giving blood, and I am pondering what to do with it.
I recently have looked at several videos on YouTube and elsewhere about machine quilting with a singer Featherweight.
The videos and blogs that I looked at said 4 basic things: since the featherweight has such a small harp, it just isn't possible to quilt anything much bigger than a crib quilt; the feed dogs have to be covered since the featherweight does not have the ability to drop the feed dogs, the motor should be allowed to cool between quilting an area that is perhaps at most 1ft(.3 meters) x 1ft, and of course that you need a darning/free motion presser foot.
One video put a little doodad (I looked at the featherweight shop to see if I could figure out the name of the little doodad, but I could not seem to find it) over the feed dogs, and a person in another video used a Teflon press cloth with a hole cut for the needle to do this. I am not sure if Amazon sells the feed dog covering doodad, but they do sell Teflon press cloths. I also got to wondering if something I already have might work, such as aluminum foil, parchment paper, or freezer paper.
Well, any way looking at the prices on Amazon, I think these things (the presser foot and the press cloth) would be at most $10 (at least before shipping), and would be something I could use the gift certificate for.
Another possibility would be a pump for my bicycle. An electric pump that you actually plug into a regular wall outlet is just too expensive, costing at least $30, however, a foot powered pump can be purchased for less than $15.
Another thing I was wondering was what book to read next. This relates to the above because it might involve buying a Kindle (or a "real" paper and ink) book from Amazon.
Currently, the "escapist literature" book I am reading is "The Wheel of Time" series by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, and I am about 70% through the last book, with about 7 hours of reading time left (or at least that is what my Kindle says).
For my next book, I have 3 ideas:
- Reread "The Lord of the Rings Series." I think I read this in 8th grade or so and if I have reread it at some point between then and now, I just don't remember. For this I would either get a physical paper and ink book from Amazon (the Kindle edition of this series is , but a used paperback of the series, in "good" condition is less than ) or the used bookstore that is about a mile from my apartment.
- I was messing around with putting and epub reader on my Kindle, and of course, to actually test the apps I found, I had to get a book in that format, so I went to project Gutenberg, and downloaded the book "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," so I could make that book and perhaps another download, "Moby Dick," the next novels that I read.
- The third possibility is that I have an app on my kindle that lists books from Amazon (or whole series) that are free or "on sale" for perhaps 99 cents or so. Many are various kinds of self-help or cookbooks, but there are also quite a bit of fiction books as well. I could look through this list, look at the reviews, and take a chance on one of these books.