Longarm season for the most part this year has come to an early close. Usually I quilt though Thanksgiving weekend. This year it seems like it got colder sooner. I don't longarm during the colder months because my machine seems to skip stitches. It's annoying.
I haven't been posting to my blog much due to some medical issues with our son and me. Nothing super serious... just colds and flu being passed from our son to me to my husband, then back to our son, me and my husband again. I think we are past the worst of it. In the meantime our son also had his wisdom teeth removed the week before Christmas... then the holidays... I found this post still as a draft on my list and decided to post it today.
These stitches are in the top of a memory quilt. I just didn't let it go out like that. Above on the black fabric are what I call "eyelash stitches". Below is a long skipped stitch. You can see how long it is where I slipped my scissors under it.
Some people just say, "you can borrow my heater". That really won't work. It's not me that is cold (although I am), it's the machine head that gets cold that is the problem. The stitch regulator just doesn't like to be cold. The last time I ran the fuel oil furnace constantly I had beautiful quiting in February. My husband was working out of town (Nashville, TN) for two months. I did not turn off the furnace and quilted a lot during the day while our son was at kindergarten. Little did I know that our fuel oil bill would be over $4,000 to refill the tanks. I think that was 2013ish. Fuel prices were about the same as they were now. It's just not worth it to quilt.
It's not so bad when I am stitching straight lines. Curves go crazy. The quilt top above (I was so frustrated I didn't even get a full photo of it on the frame), was about 60" wide. I worked on it for over three hours. It was stitch, rip out... stitch, rip out... Enough was enough. It shouldn't take me three hours to go half of a pass across the quilt. To top it off, the fabric on the top was not cotton AND fabrics were stabilized with pelon that tends to gum up my needle when it's not the right pelon, causing the thread to break at random. It was hard to see where to take out the stitches from the top because of the pajama pants fabric. I had to crawl under the machine and remove them from the cotton back. Yikes. I was so frustrated. I told the owner as I sadly gave it back to her that I would not work on this quilt until April or May when warmer weather was here.
2 comments:
Sorry you can't use your long arm now. Maybe it's a good time for piecing quilts? I hope you and your family can get over passing the germs. Happy stitching into 2023!
What a shame! I remember you saying that before, but it has to be so frustrating. I wouldn’t heat it up with bills like that either. I hope you guys are all on the road to recovery now. We’ve had so many bugs going around too.
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