Saturday I made origami snowflakes for the wedding. Thank you to my awesome friends for helping me out with wedding things this weekend! You all rock!
Today I told myself was quilting day. It was finally time to sit down and sew this quilt together. I decided to free motion meandering loops all over the quilt. I started in high spirits, but gradually got frustrated. My thread kept breaking and my top stitches were too loose. I was getting close to throwing my machine out the window. Amazingly mom called in the middle of all of this, so I was telling her what was going on. I suddenly realized that I very stupidly did not drop the feed dogs on my machine!
Feed dogs: (n), A set of feed dogs typically resembles two or three short, thin metal bars, crosscut with diagonal teeth, which move back and forth in slots in a sewing machine's needle plate. Their purpose is to pull ("feed") the fabric through the machine, in discrete steps, in-between stitches.
When free motion quilting you do not want the fabric to be fed through the machine. You want to have control of it and feed it through manually.
One of my problems was solved. Now what about the breaking thread? I was sewing with Coats & Clark Star cotton machine quilting thread. I switched to Guterman polyester sew-all thread. Ta-da! No breakage. I'm thinking the free motion movement was too stressful on the cotton thread and caused it to break. The polyester thread seems to be more sturdy. I've read about plenty of people free motion quilting with cotton thread, but I just don't think my machine likes it.
This week's project: finish quilting.
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