frenchtown fiber

Chris Mundy and Kate House try to make art while navigating the crap life throws at them.

Monday, February 2, 2009

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?


2 comments:

Marty Mason said...

Your quilting looks great....get back to it.

Chris said...

No problem, I finished last night. This morning before work, i trimmed the edges for binding.