Spent a fustrating day yesterday. Sandwiched this quilt on Friday night, all ready to sit down and quilt in on Sunday. Sunday comes, a nice lazy day at home with Daz and the girls, I can sit in peace and stipple away. Although due to usual antic of a household with a 2.5 and a 4 year old, there was interuptions, so I did this in about 5 sittings over the day, maybe that is my problem? Stiched in the ditch around the red centre boarder, small stipples around the heart, looking good! Larger stipples on the blue crazy strips, wander, wander, wander, swirly heart, wander, wander, swirly heart! All done at 8.30pm, turn it over and OMG! The tension in some area's is just horrid! I was flipping the quilt over as I sewed to check it every now and again, some times there was just one occassional heart where the lower thread hadn't locked in with the top thread so it all sort of pulled, but then one whole corner, every heart was like that! ERK! Loooks beautiful on the top. Showed Daz and his comment, "Yes, does look a bit weird" so now I am unpicking it all! Fun and games, feels like I wasted a whole day of sewing.Just can't work out why though. Tension of the machine was the same the whole time, some area's are perfect and the others like the mess below. Just one of those sewing mysteries?
9 comments:
Down with a crash? I know how that feels. I had a weekend workshop using photo transfer and when it came to the quilting I was **** (not very good)! I felt like a rank beginner.
Oh Helen....that sucks!!! I'm no good to help with tension though...sorry I never touch mine!
Oh, that's a real bummer! I can't offer a lot of advice, but I'd start with cleaning out the thread path and totally re-threading the machine and doing the same in the bobbin area - clean out and make sure the bobbin thread is feeding evenly (I've had a warped bobbin from time to time that causes similar symptoms).
Bugger Helen, a whole days work wasted, I swear these machines have gremlins sometimes, hope you get it sorted soon.
Been there, done that -- more times than I care to admit.
My first thought was the same as Vicki's -- a tiny piece of stray lint, will wreak havoc with your tension, and it will probably be a random thing. So clean it out good, and hopefully you'll be OK.
I would not mess with the tension settings themselves (at least not yet).
How incredibly frustrating! I have had times when the tension looked fine when I tested, but as I quilted it seemed to go off. In my case, I finally decided it was the (quite cheap)thread and vowed that for free motion quilting I would use better threads. I am not entirely sure that was the problem, but it was my best guess. I am so sorry that happened on your quilt!
I had the same problem over the weekend. Turned out to be a bobbin that was wound wonky. I think sometimes the quilting gods do this to us so we'll remember we aren't perfect no matter how much practice we have. ;o)
The top did look beautiful!
Yikes! My machine has done the same thing to me, takes twice as much time to get anything done. Could be the thread size, needle size, along with the tension, all three or some mysterious combination of both. Oh, a can of air sprayed at the moving bits and a prayer to the sewing machine gods.
You will be glad you took out the bad stitching once the machine is behaving properly again!
Oh no Oh noooo! Don't you hate that!!! The colours are beautiful though :)
Post a Comment