I bought blue gingham material to back the other two and decided Wednesday this week I was going to get them done. I started out by piecing left over batting. My first attempt looked like I was trying to ruffle the batting which is weird because I have done this before and it turned out fine. Also, I nearly sewed the tablecloth to my batting, not once, but twice.
Out came the stitch ripper and I decided to use safety pins every hand width to keep the batting lined up. The big piece that was all ruffly turned out to be six inches longer out flat. I will use this method again! I also took the tablecloth off the table.
Then I pinned on all the little bits to give me enough width. I used 9 different pieces altogether which was a very good use of trimmings from previous quilts.
I then pinned the backing to my quilting frame. Someday I am going to upgrade to zippers to make this process go faster! I currently sew in an unfinished basement room which is why you can see the cement wall below. I plan to take over the rec room shortly. :-)
Then I laid my pieced batting on top and that was where I stopped because everything had taken so much more time than expected that I ran out of time.
On Thursday I programmed Patricia Ritter's Flower Power Panto to quilt 72" long and 4.5" deep as I was going to quilt both baby quilts side by side at the same time. I ran out of bobbin thread about a third of the way across the first row. I had expected it because I didn't have any empty bobbins to wind a full one so needed to use a partial one up. I got a full bobbin wound and finished the first row without any issues getting caught up where one quilt ended and the next started which was my only concern.
Little did I know.....from row number 2 to row 8 is where the problems arose, and there were many of them:
- On row 2 one of my fingers got too close to the needle which nicked an outer layer of skin off - not enough to bleed, but still hurt. Plus it broke the needle.
- I had no quilting needles left so put in a universal needle. The machine hated it and broke it too.
- I took a quilting needle off another machine and put it in. It didn't break but the machine was making funny clicking noises. I took off the throat plate and cleaned under it, changed the foot, and oiled a few spots. It sounded happy again and I continued to quilt.
- Because I was paying more attention to listening to the machine, I forgot to pay attention to helping it over the gap between the two quilts and the foot went under the 2nd quilt and before I could hit the stop button, the circular foot was sewn between the layers. I should have taken a picture of this, but was not in the mood at the time! This took awhile to rip out without making a hole in the edge of the quilt. I finally got it freed up and finished the row.
- On row 3, I got half way across and QBOT went berserk and was not stitching the programmed daisies. I think I had to start and stop so many times already that it couldn't handle it! I had to shut off QBOT and set it up to quilt the pattern again. I had to let it run the pattern with the presser foot up so it wouldn't sew until it caught up with where I had ended and then continue the row.
- Row 4 and 5 went OK. I ran out of bobbin thread again at some point and had to put in a new bobbin but that is normal.
- Row 6 started and after maybe three inches of pattern, QBOT went berserk again and wouldn't even pay attention to the stop button, I had to turn the power off. At this point I took the dog and went for a long walk....
- Refreshed from my walk and fuelled from lunch I once again restarted QBOT. QBOT behaved, but my thread did not. For some unexplained reason, as nothing had changed from the morning, my upper thread broke 3 times and of course just before I finished row 8, I had to change the bobbin again, but the eighth and final row was complete.
