Creative Oozings #24 – Frus. Tra. Tion.

I’ve managed to get very little done recently.  Partly because I’ve had nowhere to set up a sewing machine and partly because all my sewing machines seem to be in various stages of death.  Mum’s Huskystar, which has been my principle machine for at least a year, got caught in a plumbing leak we had and was found sitting in a puddle of water.  I took it to my trusty sewing machine repair man and he worked minor miracles to clean out the rust and get it working again (fortunately it’s a purely mechanical machine), but when I came to use it at Quilt Club I found that the tension seemed to be all over the place, it was not sounding completely right, and then a screw fell out while I was doing a bit of free-motion quilting on the border.  Ack.  And Toby’s quilt is now partially quilted but I think I’m going to have to rip it all out and start again because the back is a nightmare of loops.  I’m going to take it back to Mr Knight to see if anything can be done to salvage it (again!).  But that’s ok, I thought – I have my cheap-ass AEG machine that I bought in Germany!  It’s been serviced and sorted after I accidentally nadgered it, let’s see how that works out.  It won’t FMQ (can’t drop the feed dogs), but maybe I can make a start on piecing Jess’s quilt!

Ummm, no.  Not so much.  I tried to use it to make some half-square triangles at Quilt Club on Thursday and it was a nightmare.  Could barely sew in a straight line (I promise that I can do straight lines by now), and I realised after not long at all that it simply wasn’t feeding the fabric properly at all.  I tested it by letting it run along with no guidance from me (I knew I’d be getting out the seam ripper anyway) and what I got looked like a letter M written by a drunk spider in teeny stitches (I’d set the stitch length to 3 out of a possible maximum of 4).  And the HSTs I’d wrestled through looked rather more puckered than I felt they should, too – I’m going to have to unpick the handful I did.

Luckily, I’d taken my Japan Fan door curtain and its wadding along, so I spent the rest of the session pin-basting those to their wadding (no back yet because I want apply it later and turn it through so there’s no binding necessary), then Diane very kindly let me borrow her machine to make a start on the quilting.  I’m using a variegated metallic gold thread to highlight the fans at the moment and I am so pleased with how the first few are looking.  I’m definitely going to need more sparkly thread, though!