This Thing was Moving Right Along, Until...

This piece has been up a few times now. I had company coming Saturday, so I really needed to be getting ready for that, but when I woke up, all by myself in the early morning, I went down to the art cellar to work. I started filling in around the main quilting I had already finished. I was doing contour lines, which is very relaxing to me. I was in the zone, moving along nicely and BAM!! The needle broke!

I was stupified for a minute. God, I hate breaking a needle. It's so violent. I've done it a few times in my life. Always when I had hit a pin. But, there were no pins.

I have had this sewing machine for about a year now. I bought it at a quilt show, from a store in NJ that had a booth there. I was definitely ready for a new machine, and I spoke to a sales person, who had me sitting trying out this amazing machine... and I had just gotten a big bonus at work... It was so different from my old machine, which was a high school graduation gift in 1978. I was literally afraid of it for a while. It did things and made noises that I could not understand. Once I had to take it in for service because it would not sew. The thread kept getting jacked-up in the bobbin area. The nice man at the store informed me that I had it threaded wrong. Like, duh. How could that possibly be? I've come along way with the thing, but this new needle breaking development really stumped me. I took the bent and busted needle off and went to the trouble-shooting section of the book. There were a number of reasons why a needle might break, but none that would apply to this case. I had a special free-motion plate on, and to me, it always looked like the needle was too close to the edge of the hole. But, as I mentioned, I had been sewing with it just about a year. I put in a new needle and looked down from the top of the machine to get a better idea of the needle's position, and it didn't look as bad as I thought. Still not in the middle of the hole, but not as close to the edge as it had appeared. Still, I could not bring myself to sew any longer. I was afraid of it again.

I will go at it again soon, most likely tonight. I am very close to finishing the work I want to do with the machine on this piece, and start on some hand work. My machine, by the way, is a Janome 6600.
Anybody have one?