Frustrated

My sewing machine (Bernina 570) has been giving me a few problems lately. I get it serviced every year at the end of the year - usually taking it in during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. But I’ll be taking it in early this year. For the past several months, the automatic thread cutter has been only cutting the top thread and leaving the bobbin thread uncut. When I start to sew again, it tangles. So, I’ve been using a leader or ender (more precisely, a “thread rabbit”) whenever I can to avoid cutting the thread. Ok, a pain-in-the-butt workaround, but not really a big deal. But every once in a while, the machine stops and the message states the bobbin is empty. I got suckered into checking it the first couple times, but I learned that if it does that when I know darn well the bobbin is full, I just press the ‘X’ to close out the screen and can continue sewing. It rarely happened, so I forgot about it until yesterday.

The Fan of the Library quilt top was finished, and I pin basted it on Thursday in order to quilt it myself so I could practice quilting feathers. On Friday, I got the first block done and was pleased enough with the feathers for a first effort.

With a little more practice, it would be easy to make those feathers fluffier and get the two sides to meet in the top of the fan arc, eliminating the need to sew a curl there. OK. I can do this. On to the second fan. That’s when my machine decided that the bobbin thread was empty. I cleared the message, continued trying to stitch the second fan, got another three seconds of stitching in and Stop! Bobbin empty message again. After a few (like a dozen) more of these stops and error messages, I gave up. I switched from my free-motion foot to my walking foot and the same thing happened.  In order to preserve my sanity, to say nothing of my machine and the nearby window, I turned it off and walked away. 

Today I will try to sew something - anything with my regular machine quarter inch foot. Once again I’ll clean and re-thread the machine as I’d done before starting the quilting. Depending on how the machine behaves, it will either go in today for servicing (if it’s not sewing at all) or next Saturday after our Quilts for Kids workshop, which will be at the same store where I get my machine serviced. In the meantime, Ruby said she can finish the quilting (not feathers, but at least something) on her longarm. She’ll take it with her when she comes to “Church of Bernina” on Sunday and return it on Wednesday. I have a backup machine to use whenever I need to, and when the Bernina returns from servicing, I can try again with feathers on another quilt top. And I will definitely try again.

But, everything was fine for the earlier part of the week through Thursday, and I got lots sewn. 

Here are three Rolling Stone blocks that I sewed in purple, my mistaken Color of the Month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. The block on the top right is magenta, not wine-colored as it appears. Purples  are problematic for my iPhone. 

They will finish at 12”. Next I sewed some Hollow Nine blocks with 2.5” squares (6” finished):

And I webbed the Unicorn quilt. That white print in the top has tossed unicorn heads in blue-purple and red-purple, so I took that as license to mix all the matching purple shades and tints in the pieced blocks. 

It’s not exactly “cute”, although it is nicer and brighter in person. The top measures about 40x50”. The best part is that it ate up a lot of older purple scraps on the front and the pieced back. My purple scrap bin is smaller than my other colors, and now the remaining scraps all fit into it. Yesssss! 

And I had another little incident on Thursday. I was walking up to the clubhouse, along a tree-lined street, when a tree branch broke and fell down about 12’ in front of me. It wasn’t a huge branch, and even if I’d been hit, I don’t think it would’ve done much except scare the bejeebers out of me and possibly knock off my sunglasses. But still. I backed up a bit and took a picture - the branch is in the road by the bench and tree in the middle of the photo. 

I dragged the branch out of the street and onto the grass and called one of our groundskeepers. And then I finished walking to the clubhouse (the building in shadow behind the trees) and played cards all afternoon with my friends. 

All in all, it was a good week. One of the highlights was taking a 3.5-mile walk with a friend (probably a bit much for my first serious post-surgical walk), but nothing hurts except the ol’ back! And my hips. And ….  linking up to Scrappy Saturday. Life is good!