Wednesday 4 December 2013

Know when to stop.

I'm putting this post up in the spirit of honesty, it's about when quilting or my attitude to quilting, goes horribly wrong.
I was tired and hand't slept well the night before, this should've been a warning that measuring wasn't going to go my way. Being me I thought "bugger it" and did anyway. I'm on a bit of a kick to get ALL of my wip's all done before January and frankly this just added to the "I can do it!" attitude.

I measured the quilt top.
I missed 10" 
And I don't know how.


Needless to say the twin wadding I bought based on the measurement didn't fit. I had to zig-zag wadding bits together. I should've stopped here and bought a bigger sized wadding the next day in hindsight. 


The loft floor, while I hadn't measured it, was also too small to baste a quilt this large on.
I rolled it and basted it - that was a first & possibly a last on the floor. 
I couldn't find pins so I spray basted it, a whole can of 505. We'll see how well that holds! 

Finally onto the quilting :D 
I thought about FMQ Chrysanthemums, I even tried two of them and promptly decided they involved way too much starting and stopping for something this big. Meandering quilting it was then, I know most people don't love this type of quilting but I really like the texture it creates and on Tana Lawn I think it will be amazing! 
So half an hour into meandering around the quilt top I hear a noise coming from the needle plate, something didn't sound quite right. 
My tension had gone on holiday and left this mess behind.


The words I said at this point weren't "Oh Darn it" 
This is the point I knew it was time to stop. 
It's still sitting up there in the loft waiting to be unpicked.

Any thoughts about FMQ on the Horizon 7700? It's been fine then all of a sudden this happens, for no reason that I can see.

I'm waiting until I've had a good nights sleep before I head up to the loft to unpick this mess! 

I hope your sewing is more productive and a lot less stressful than mine has been :D 

3 comments:

  1. Oh no!! I hate when you get a string of negative things happening to your quilting. :( I don't have any great advice on the fmq issue other than trying a different brand of thread. But I wanted to share a tip on basting such a large quilt. This woman has a tutorial on basting with boards and it's so helpful! I now do this on my kitchen island so it's at waist level and doesn't break my back/knees. http://colormequilty.blogspot.com/2013/04/board-basting.html Good luck!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. You have all my sympathy! It's awful when things go wrong and you try to force it anyway. Time for a glass of wine and a step back for me! This may not be right, but that mess looks like what happens with my machine if I forget to put the foot down. It's a straight stitch model that doesn't refuse to do this like my other machine. And when I'm FMQing, I sometimes lift the foot to see where I'm going and forget...with that result. Could that be it?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh, that word, how annoying! Hope you get back into the swing of it!

    ReplyDelete

Chat away - I enjoy reading comments and will respond here or by email :)