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“Learning Experience”

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Last Saturday, I went to the long-arm quilters to finish Rainbow Sherbet (blogged here and here)…and by the end of the day, I was still surprisingly calm.  Surprising because of all the things that went wrong:

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  • 2 Quilters scheduled to rent the same machine at the same time…  I was on the original machine… other lady was SUPER PISSED when they moved hers off the frame (she had come in the night before) to a nicer machine… eventually she calmed down, but was making things awkward for everyone else.  Ironic because she wasn’t actually quite ready to quilt when she came in – she hadn’t picked out her pantograph pattern or anything *rolling eyes*
  • Issues winding bobbins
  • Didn’t wind enough bobbins
  • Didn’t perfectly center my backing fabric, so I ended up a bit short on one side & had to cut off the quilting
  • Actually loaded the quilts on the wrong way, but that’s an easy fix – unzip and rezip
  • Missing workers who had knowledge of how to use the long-arms – they had to call in the reserve troops to come help
  • Sewed thru the plastic clamps (no harm done to any of my stuff, just holes in the clamps now, oops!)

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I’m so ridiculously happy over this binding… thank you, Heather Ross, for your Lightning Bugs line!

And my thread kept breaking – all likely due to this combo of factors:

  • Bobbin tension all sorts of wrong
  • Top tension wrong
  • Figured out I can only really go left to right with the quilting – some forgiveness allowed for pantos, but can’t do straight loops right to left
  • Wrong needle size for the varigated thread I was using – cotton threads need bigger needles (versus poly), since the thread is thicker and can rub
  • And while I love the thread I used, the varigation caused problems (I think) – because the dye changes weaken the thread
  • Plus the cotton creates so much lint, so I had to keep cleaning out the bobbin casing

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I quilted my name…because, why not??

My 4-hour time block turned into 5 1/2 hours before I got everything done – but because of the chaos, they only charged me for 2 hours of time, which was more than fair.

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someone thinks this quilt belongs to him – shoulda known, his favorite toy mousies are the hot pink and orange ones…

And despite all of the mishaps, I remained super relaxed the entire day (with the exception of a few moments of frustration with the thread breaks).  Maybe because of the other stress in my life right now, this didn’t seem like such a big deal.  And I gotta say, I sure learned a heck of a lot!  In my former life as an auditor, we were taught to be wary of the phrase “learning experience” because it usually meant disaster was waiting in the wings…that phrase continues to have application and meaning in my life.

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I drove Steve back up to Ventura on Sunday morning so he could finish the last 60 miles of the MS Ride.  I hit up the Walmart, and then parked under a tree in the parking lot, opened up the sunroof, turned on iTunes, laid out my supplies and started binding said quilt using my interpretation of this tutorial.  Much much much faster than what I’ve done in the past, but it still took me all week to get finished.  I mean, I’m not that fast even with the improved methodology, and there is 25 feet of binding on the quilt.  (25 feet sounds so much more dramatic to me than 300″ – easier to interpret.)  Granted, I was distracted for most of the time I was working on it, but that’s OK.

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Anyway, this is my contribution to the Blogger’s Quilt Festival – I’ve never done so much work, and all of it myself, on a quilt before, and I’m really proud of how it all came out.  Sure, it’s not perfect, but that was never my intention anyway! ;)

~Michelle~ on October 11th, 2009 | Category: Projects for Me, Quiltalong, Quilting | 18 comments

18 comments to “Learning Experience”