Walk, Don't Run

For those of you who do artwork, you know there's a lot of tedious work to be done besides the exciting stuff.  This may be especially so for quiltmakers...it is certainly so for me.  And frustrating times in the process as well. 

First off, after almost finishing the piecing,  I took my machine down to the store where I purchased it to have them look at it because I was having a problem.  The presser foot was not holding onto the fabric as I was stitching it.  I'm trying to complete this piece for Christmas, so I really didn't want to surrender my machine if I didn't need to.   Since I was midway on this project, the person who was working there suggested that I use a walking foot to proceed until I could bring it back in for repair. Indeed that seemed to work, although I was really and truly struggling with this monster in my little machine to the point where I've  stopped a number of times to apply Capzasin cream to my hands that hurt so much I had to give them a rest.

I've been at it all week - laying in the quilting on a good sized quilt on my little machine can be a major feat!  About three quarters of the way through it my walking foot broke.  Just broke off while I was sewing!  Grrrr!  I also noticed that the first line (the entire row of stitching from top to bottom, over which I had already stitched umteen times in the other direction already, was a very bad stitch that had to be ripped out. You can't see the bottom of your work while you're stitching on the top.  And once the whole quilt is adequately stuffed in there, you don't pull it out to look at the underside unless you have some inkling that something is wrong.  I had no idea that it was a mess on the underside.  I did see that the stitch was too small so I lengthened the stitch for the next rows and most of them were just fine - whew! So, I'm now slowly and tediously ripping out the bad row of stitching one by one!

And what next, you say?  The tip broke off of my good seam ripper as I was working!  See how long the tip on the blue one is?  See how small the tip is now on the red one?  Ah huh!