I had this darned quilt sandwiched and basted a month ago, then cleaned the sewing machine, set it up for quilting. I had free motion quilted my previous quilt (Birds of a Feather) with the same thread. Easy peasy, right? Simply load up the quilting thread, reset the tension, drop the feed dogs and away I go!
Not.
I spent a week of evenings fighting with thread tension. It would run a straight stitch with feed dogs no problem. Drop the feeds and try to free motion? Nested gnarled mess. I started to procrastinate; between gardening and a family vacation I eventually hit full-on denial. The good news? In an effort to find anything to do other than this quilt I finally got some work done on my car and finished several fix-it projects around the house.
However, my sewing room is also my office. Every day I faced that quilt and machine. I vowed to either get the tension right or switch to a different machine. I rewound a new bobbin and oddly enough, that seemed to do the trick. I had to rip out a few first attempts, but after that I got in 20 minutes or so of real quilting.
Busy weekend, but I got a chance to sew some more last night. Eleven stars so far. Tension is a little haphazard - so I'm playing with that. At least it's not so far off I need to rip and restitch. Fingers crossed!
Tension is always a pain to get just right. My tension will be fine and then bang, it's all loopy underneath. Then it's time to rip out and try to figure out what went wrong. So frustrating!!! Yours looks good now.
ReplyDelete