Murphy's Law of Quilting

Naturally, once I got my quilting groove back, Murphy's Law figuratively punches me in the face and steals my wallet. Seriously, it's uncanny. IN the last few months, with years having followed patterns and not deviating a whole lot, I've been making a lot of things without patterns...just letting them develop as the ideas come to mind.  It's been a lot of fun sewing without the safety net of a pattern, and it's been one of the few times in my creative life that it's come with just about unilateral success.  I've felt like lately I've been growing as a quilter, becoming more adventurous, more willing to try new things and new ideas, and developing my skills more.  I've always been intimidated somewhat by all the brilliant quilters around me, that I can't hold a match to their skills but it's been a really encouraging experience finding my groove and finding confidence in my work.

But I'm beginning to think somewhere someone installed a camera in my sewing room and waits for every time I am on a real creativity streak and pushes the "ruin her day with something ridiculous because we can't have this kind of fun just happening willy nilly" button.

My machine has bit the dust, and all because of a stupid pin run over while making a shop sample. 

Son of a bee sting.  Everyone runs over pins, every day, all the time.  It's like the one quilting "rule" that everyone knows about and laughs in the face of.  Wellllllllll now, isn't this special.

To the right, is the quilt I was working on when my machine up and croaked, only it was at a lesser state of completion.  I was in the middle of piecing Row flippin' 2. Finished the rest at the shop.

 But back to the machine.  Like I said, I ran over a pin. Broke my needle.  Check out the half-a-pin still in the fabric. It happens to everyone.  But where's the other half?

Well...there's the point of impact but uh...the rest of the pin is MIA and this time, it didn't hit me in the face like it has in the past.  Go figure.  

Would you believe that just before I started this project, I dusted out my machine?  Anyway, I opened my machine up and the other half of the pin is still nowhere to be readily seen. There's my bobbin thread, and some dust, but uh...no pin. What the hell, Bernina?

 Oh riiiiiight. It's THERE.  Stuck in the bobbin region, see it to the right?  I took out the bobbin thing, and got the pin out.  Surprisingly, it wasn't in there tight at all, really it pretty much fell out on its own when I went to grab it (gently) with some needlenose pliers...because in that space my fingers might as well be Oscar Meyer weiners. I thought "hey, if it came out this easy, all I have to do is put my bobbin region back together like I have a million times before, clean it out and I'll be back in business!"  Foolish, foolish me.

Foolish me indeed.  Remember Murphy's Law?  Yeah, here's where it punched me in the face.  I reassembled everything as I always have, got it all clean and rethreaded everything and got ready to sew.  When I used the hand wheel (as always) to pull up the bobbin thread...well, Houston, we have a problem.  My needle was getting bent, like so.  I thought, hey man, what gives? So I figured I didn't get the bobbin region put back together correctly. I took it apart, made sure it was in right (it was) and tried again...5 times.  Same thing every time.  So what do I do in these situations?  CALL MY MOMMY!  No seriously, she's good with machines, and knows Berninas. I told her what happened, and she confirmed what I was reallllly hoping wouldn't be true - the timing on my machine was beyond screwed up and I had to take it in to be looked at.






Well, at $135 for the shop to even look at my machine, plus whatever it cost to fix it plus whatever else they found was wrong (which I know there are other issues with it, mainly electronic) plus whatever parts were needed to fix it...Yeah, Murphy's Law stole my wallet too, because Berninas only take Bernina parts and Bernina's prices are just laughably ridiculous. 

Were this machine not a hand me down from Mom, I could never afford to buy a Bernina at all.  But I also can't afford to fix it right now either.  $135 to look at it plus $X to do whatever it needs?  I can buy a good little workhorse machine for that much and I plan to once my paycheck hits, hopefully. It was recommended several times that I look at a Brother machine, because they're relatively inexpensive but are good quality machines. So I'll give one a look and see what I come home with. 

So yeah...My creative burst got stymied by one stupid little pin.  Well played, Murphy you asshole, well played.

The Case of the Mysterious Vanishing Quilt

I have never, ever, ever ever ever made a quilt just for me. None. So now I started making one for me.  The colors are bright, weird and garish and I LOVE them.  They are some remnants of the sales pieces from reps that didn't sell and they hated, so they gave them to me because hey, they know my taste can be a little left of center.  And it is.

I haven't been this excited about a project in a long time, because it is 100% my style, and I love every single little weirdo piece in that quilt. It clashes, and it's supposed to.  I love it because it's bizarre and there's so much for the eye to try and focus on.

So I cut these into 2.5" strips and squares, made 16 patches and 4 patches...arranged them how I wanted...

...pinned them together... and took them home from the shop to sew at home and to figure out how much black accent fabric I needed for those blank spaces...

Then...it vanished. Straight up disappeared, somewhere between the shop, my car and my house.  I turned my car upside down, shook it out, found nothing.  Checked my bags, the shop, my living room, my sewing room, my yard, the bathroom...nowhere.  John looked for it.  Mom looked for it. No one found anything.  It vanished into thin air.  David Copperfield's got NOTHING on this quilt, I swear.

So apparently some UFO has floated down and stole my U.F.O. So far that's the only logical answer yet.  lol.  I'll find it eventually when I least expect it, and I'm sure it'll be somewhere completely stupid.

Next time I walk into my kitchen, it'll show up on top of the fridge. (just kidding, I already checked)

Spoonflower, sit down. We need to talk.

Well, I just ordered my very first bit of yardage off of Spoonflower. For those of you that don't know, Spoonflower is a site that allows you to design and sell your own fabric. You have many options as to fabric type, from cotton and voile to upholstery and sateen. The cool thing about it, is since these are individuals designiong their own fabrics, you can find literally just about anything on there. I mean, one time I found baboons with bared teeth. I was psyched.

But the other day John and I were talking and he was asking me about quilting stuff. He commented on how cool it would be to have a firefighting themed fabric and so I showed him that, uh yeah of course that's out there! I showed him Spoonflower and how many different types of appealing-to-dudes stuff there is out there and we stumbled across some Coast Guard fabrics on there.

It's called "Semper Paratus", which is the Coast Guard motto (much like "Semper Fidelis" is to the Marine Corps) and well...it's ships and boats and Coastie paraphenalia. He thought it was pretty cool, so without him (at the time) knowing it, I bought a yard of it. 

Now. Before I say a single word, this is NOT a criticism of the designer, Bowsprite whatsoever. She actually has nothing to do with my complaint - her work is absolutely WONDERFUL and she's a sweetheart to boot. No, no, this is a critique of Spoonflower.

I don't know if you can see in the picture, which if you clicked on the link at the beginning anyway it's pretty irrelevent....but the prices are 100% outrageous. For quilting quality cotton (Kona, in this case) it is a heart-stopping $18 per yard. No brick and mortar quilt store, or even fabric manufacturer could get away with retailing Kona cotton for that price. I understand, to an extent, their need to meet overhead in this relatively small scale bolt-by-bolt operation but really? $18 per yard?! After shipping, this single yard cut cost $21 and change. If this wasn't needed for somebody else, trust me, I wouldn't have bought it at all. I feel like that price point is taking advantage of the fact that a customer needsthat print and can't get it anywhere else - sort of following the captive audience rationale of selling bottled water at the fair for $4 per bottle. I have NO problem buying something like that for John, in that regard, cost isn't an issue - I'd buy it again in a heartbeat. But the issue I have is one on principle - no quilt store would do that to their customers, and so the fact that Spoonflower does it unabashedly gives me some real heartburn as a quilt store employee and as a customer.

I had the fabric mailed to his house as a surprise so he'd be the first to see it, and so yesterdayhe brought it to me so I could match some fabrics to it for him. I was absolutely STUNNED when I saw that not only is the color in the picture majorly skewed (it's very muted in actuality, and it's less a red and more an orange in the boats) But the print is outlined and begins nearly 1.5" from the INSIDE of the selvedge. That is nearly a 2" waste on each selvedge end, making a ~44" WOF piece a ~40" usable piece. For $18 per yard, that is really quite unacceptable. Just imagine if I had chosen this fabric in Sateen, which retails at $27/yard? A 4" waste at that cost is absolutely ridiculous.

So. While their fabrics are adorable and their designers just out of this world talented, Spoonflower is not what it's cracked up to be. Again, this is not the fault of the vendors or the designers, it is the fault of the company itself. The high cost and the cheating of usuable space makes it completely not worth it unless it is a piece of fabric that is utterly imperative for you to have, in which case, expect to get the captive audience treatment.

That being said...I can't wait to get my other projects finished so I can start on this one.