Looks Like January

There are still many weeks to get through until January...not to mention several holidays...but you'd never know it to look outside our windows here in the Pacific Northwest. Geez. It has been dark and gloomy for a week. We're expecting better weather next week, but sheesh. I guess it's Mother Nature's way of saying...get ready. It's coming.

Sadie doesn't mind. She's hard at work on her stitching cat job.

Thanks to her hard work, I finished up January's heart this morning.

You might recall that I met the designer of the Hearts online recently. Her name is Nancy Buck Huggins, and she's been hard at work getting these patterns uploaded to her Etsy shop. If you're interested in these, take a look. She calls her shop Basket Case Needlework.

Tomorrow I'll get a start on February's heart. This will be the 11th of 12, and so these are coming to a close.

Back on the quilting front, I've convinced Sadie to sleep on the chair beside me while I quilt...for now, at least.

Another row of blocks was quilted yesterday, but not without a lot of fussing and fuming over skipped stitches. At first, I blamed the unevenly wound bobbin I was using. I kept going and then rewound the bobbin, evenly this time. It made no difference whatsoever. I still was having a massive problem with skipped stitches. On my sample piece, you can see how it skipped around ten stitches before catching the bottom thread again.

Checking the trouble-shooting portion of the machine's manual, it suggested an old or blunt needle might be to blame. That sounded about right since I didn't change the needle between quilts. So I put in a new needle, in the size I'd been using (100/16) and that was no help. [Mad face.] Then I tried putting in a 100/18 needle. That didn't help either. Then I tried rethreading several times. No help. Okay, so I tried rethreading the bobbin several times. Nothing changed. Then, I adjusted the tension to extremes in both directions. Even when the tension was looking good, I was still getting skipped stitches. I cleaned everything, oiled everything. By then, I was down to wondering if it was because I was coming to the end of a spool. You can see the spool was getting low on thread.

Still, when I pressed my thumbnail through to the spool inside, there was still quite a lot of thread left.

At that point, I considered the ultimate solution of throwing the machine out the window to see if that helped. Think of it as the big "Reset" option. Then, I realized there was a new spool of the identical thread in the mailbox, and so I waited until Mike came home with the day's mail to see if a new spool might solve the problem. When I had it in my hands, I loaded it onto the machine...

And voila! Problem solved.

Isn't quilting fun?

Okay, well I'm glad to be starting a new day with a new spool of thread and a significantly improved attitude. There is one row of blocks remaining, and then there is also the border. Free motion quilting always makes my left wrist hurt, and so I might take a day off. Mike and I need to make a trip to the post office to pick up a couple of undelivered parcels. [Insert rant here about the crappy mail delivery service we have in our area.] Actually, only one of us needs to go, but I figure I'll ride along just to be companionable.

When I came upstairs to write this post, I left Sadie snuggled up in a flannel quilt. Just so you know, she doesn't sleep all the time.

Sometimes she hangs out in the bathroom because mice are getting into the electric heater in there. Who knows how they're getting in, but we know they're there when we see the kitties doing this:

Come rain or shine, there's always an adventure here at the Three Cats Ranch. What we really need is another cat.