Wet Wednesday

It's a rainy, blustery day here in Oregon.  Admittedly, it is preferable to the snow that some of you are dealing with, but the weather is going to need to improve before I'll believe that Spring has sprung.  Nevertheless, it seems a perfect opportunity to tell you about a little invite I received to join in a quilt along last night.  Do you remember the Hello Sun quilt I've been working on?

This is as far as I've taken the quilt for now.  Next time I work on it I will finish up the top.  This quilt along was designed by April Mae Designs.  It was so much fun to work on the monthly blocks that I was kind of sad when it ended.

So imagine how excited I was last night when I received in invitation to participate in the new Hello Moon quilt along.  What fun!  The general instructions, January, and February blocks have already been posted.  You can find the button that links to it over there in my right side bar.  I'm joining in.  Now I'm excited to get started, because I don't have nearly enough projects going already.

Okay, so now I'm wondering.  How many of you saw this when I posted the image of the True Hope quilt yesterday?

A big thank you to Becky who pointed out the error of my ways.  Of course this means I have to remake the whole triangle block since the four patch acts as the foundation for everything else.  Oh well.  I'm glad to have noticed it now so that I wouldn't have to claim some sort of I-did-that-on-purpose-to-make-up-for-my-inherent-perfection excuse.

And speaking of perfection, yesterday afternoon was one of those days when I was reminded that sometimes you're the pigeon and sometimes you're the statue.  Yesterday I was the statue where my new sewing machine is concerned.  I blame the computer for being so obstinate.

I've been having trouble with the needle threader because every time I activate it, the red light of death illuminates.

This has been causing me no small amount of angst.  Of course, it never happens when I go in for a new owner's class.  The only way I've been able to clear it is to turn the machine off and then turn it on again, which is my way of showing the computer that it may be smarter, but I still have all the power.  And people have offered up reasons this might be happening.  None of the reasons offered up so far make any sense because if I had forgotten to do something, it wouldn't make any difference whether I turned it on or off again.  Whatever I was forgetting would still be present, and I should still get the red light of death.  My diagnosis is that for some reason, the computer loses its marbles and forgets it's a sewing machine whenever I activate the needle threader.

Yesterday the problem got even worse with this "Maindrive Sync Failed" message, and I started thinking it was like all the other computers in the world:  out to get me, specifically.  I even called the store to scream "What is its effing problem?!?!?!?"  Someone suggested I try turning the hand crank, which I had already done.  But then, obviously because someone was on the phone looking over my shoulder, it cleared the problem and it worked fine after that.  And I've had no more problems with it since.  Hmph.

Actually, I've come to believe that it was because of the metallic thread I was trying to use.  It was a new spool, and I'm thinking that a tiny fiber of metal off the thread got stuck in the little threader mechanism.  I sort of ran some "floss" through it, and now it seems fine.  And it better be because I am not opposed to throwing the machine out the window if necessary to further make my point about the power in this relationship.  (Throwing it out the window would definitely show it who's boss.)

Anyway...so I suppose you want to know why I would torture myself with metallic thread on my new sewing machine.  I was quilting the guitar strings onto the Perfect Harmony quilt.  Once I got the sewing machine to act like a sewing machine, it handled that metallic thread like a champion, and I managed to sew all the strings with nary a problem or a single thread breakage.  Pretty amazing, if you think about it.

I'm really liking how this is turning out so far.

And then I switched to regular cotton thread and quilted the first guitar.

As I write this, I'm about half way finished quilting the red guitar.  I'm hoping to get all of the guitars quilted today, but you never can tell.  I'm also going to do some housework since I spent my housework time cursing and threatening the sewing machine yesterday.  Not that I ever curse at inanimate objects, you understand.  I only do that on days that end in "y".

So how's the weather at your end?