Project Run-away

It's been fun this week to alternate between the garrison quilt on the new machine...

...and the table runner on the old (1962) Singer.

All but the decorative stitch was done on the Singer

Working back and forth between projects allowed me to shift gears whenever fatigue or boredom set in. It also helped relieve the stiffness and soreness in my neck and arms.

That is, until the old Singer went renegade.

I had been sewing along nicely, carefully stitching in the ditch, lifting my foot up off the pedal every few stitches to re-position the table runner to help keep the stitching precisely in the seam. And then it happened. I lifted my foot up off the pedal, but instead of stopping, the machine kept going. What????

Panic!!! How to keep the needle in the ditch and try to stop the machine??? Instinctively I turned off the machine's light switch--forgetting that it was only a light switch. These old machines had no on/off switch. So now my sewing area was dark and the machine was still chugging away. By this time, the needle was out of the ditch and heading into the sashing. The plug, the plug!  I whipped my head around to look down at the fancy multi-plug electrical outlet and saw not one, but three plugs, side-by-side. I yanked out the first one. Wrong plug! By this time the machine was stitching merrily down the middle of the sashing. Jerked out the second plug--and thanks be to the quilting gods, the machine came to an immediate halt.

Turns out the culprit wasn't the machine itself, but the cheap-o foot pedal (not the original). The hinge pin had popped out of one side and made the pedal twist, causing it to get stuck in the pressed-down position. (They just don't make 'em like they used to.) The good news is I only had to rip out about three inches of stitching, as I'd been moving along at a conservative pace and the machine had kindly maintained that speed while on auto-pilot. The bad news is I had forgotten to lengthen my stitches after piecing, so those darned quilting stitches were about 14 to an inch--and when I yanked the plugs out of the wall, my arm was in such an awkward position that I pulled the muscles in my shoulder. So much for relieving stiffness and soreness!

Oh, well, it could have been worse. Afterward, my husband and I headed to The Center for Women and Families to donate the twin-sized quilt, also made on the old Singer.

As mentioned in a previous post, if you live in the Kentuckiana area and would like to donate any (new) handmade items to a good cause, this wonderful place takes in families in immediate crisis, and will gladly send your new handmade items home with the families when they relocate.

Back to the garrison quilt. I tried all the free-motion feet that came with the Horizon 8900, and even though Janome has enlarged the openings on the open-toe foot and the closed-toe foot since the original (7700), I still have better visibility with the darning foot. And since the 'hopping' motion of that foot drives me nuts, I pulled up Leah Day's directions again on getting rid of the bar on the darning foot. One difference--she bends the bar back, whereas I cut it completely off about midway and smooth the cut end with a bastard-file (that's not cursing! LOL). One caution, if you cut the bar instead of bending it: protect your eyes. When I cut the bar with the wire cutters, that little piece of steel went flying so fast and furiously that we still haven't located it. All we know is that it's somewhere up in the rafters of my husband's shop. Thank goodness it went away from me instead of toward me.

Hooking up to Leah Day's FMQ Project Linkup and Sarah Craig's Whoop Whoop Friday. Be sure to check out those blogs and then click on some of the reader linkups at the bottom of each one. Lots of inspiration!

Have a wonderful weekend...and happy March to all!

Linda