Laugh with me!

Isn’t this always the way things go: when you’re in a hurry, s**t happens. My first mishap while quilting my Mystery Quilt can be seen below.

What the heck IS that? A scrap of fabric stuck to the quilt, and I quilted it right into the back! How did I miss that? I was intent on getting the quilting right, I guess, and in a hurry, of course. No way am I ripping out all that free-motion quilting to get out this scrap. I found if I trim the scrap very close to the quilting stitches, it pulls right out. But there is a lot of trimming and pulling of threads to do. You just have to laugh at this one. And be glad it’s not you.

My Mystery Quilt is heavily quilted, and I was careful to clean my machine as I went along. Look at this fuzz build-up:

A bird could build a nest out of that lint! I used Dream Orient batting, a combination of silk, bamboo, Tencel and cotton, for the first time. It is thin and very soft and quilted beautifully. However, it was more expensive, and I probably could just as easily have used Dream Cotton. For this project, I didn’t need the “elegant silky soft drape” described on the package. I don’t think it produced more lint than a cotton batt would have. The fuzz was just a product of the amount of quilting I did.

In the end, my effort to keep my machine in tip-top shape failed. Mishap #2: My Bernina 1230 broke anyway just as I was about to attach the binding. The motor runs, but the needle doesn’t move up and down. My really old back-up Bernina went off to Colorado with my daughter after Christmas, so I had to sew the binding on with a Singer Featherweight. Thank goodness I had one:

So I drove about 90 miles today to Top Stitch Sewing Service, where my quilting buddies buy their machines and take them for repairs. (Along the way, I saw a magnificent bald eagle, ripping the guts out of a carcass in a field right near the road. I mention this just so you get the idea that I was nowhere near a city.) Top Stitch is on State Route C east of Versailles and north of Barnett, and I thought I might have trouble finding a little sewing shop way out in farm country. The shop really is surrounded by fields, but I couldn’t miss the 4-foot-high red BERNINA letters on the building, and it was the biggest sewing machine store I’ve ever been in! They don’t sell fabric—only machines, cabinets and thread.

The shop owner, Tim, said, “We can fix anything,” so there probably will be no need for me to buy a new machine, but I checked out the Bernina 830 while I was there, since I drove so far. (Impressive but pricey, even with the good deal Tim quoted me.) The shop will do a rush job for me, and my 1230 should be ready on Friday. But guess what? A snowstorm is coming. Back to get my machine on 90 miles of typical Missouri Ozark roads? You gotta laugh with me on this one….