Well, Where Have I Been?

 

I'm sure given my recent posts, you might come to the conclusion that I was on yet another Road Trip.

 

Nope.

 

This week has been full of job hunting adventures.  Not the most exciting activity to blog about so I won't bore you all with the details.  Let's just say - I'm still looking. 

 

And I haven't spent much time quilting.  I did manage to fit in a quick trip to Michigan for yard work and took both dogs with me. And a sewing project.

After almost 45 years, my Dad's Czech Kroj shirt was in bad shape and a wee bit too small. I was drafted asked to make him a new one.  Of course, there was no pattern so I had to draft one from another shirt.  All of the blackwork and the lace portion of the sleeves were salvaged from the old shirt.  Mom told me the lace work was made by my great-grandmother and it's in pretty good shape.  The blackwork is showing it's age, as the front placket was originally done on a plain thin cotton.  I lifted it all from the old shirt and appliqued it down to the new shirt in the hope of the extra layer giving it a little longer life. It's hard to see but the black work has a row of open loops along two of the edges which I hand stitched down individually to retain their shape. I used Kona cotton for the body & upper sleeve.

 

If you all remember, I had just had my workhorse Singer cleaned & tuned up just last month. This was in anticipation of a machine quilting class on October 12th, at Pieceful Gathering (a LQS), taught by Terry Johnson, (check out her Blog here) which was great!   The class size - 6 students was perfect for individual instruction, questions, variety, etc. 

 

Since the class was in the afternoon, I thought I'd start the day doing some quilting on the DWR quilt.  I threaded up & stitched around all the arcs to stabilize it. And then hung it up on the wall until I can figure out the rest of the quilting I want to do on it.  Then I figured I better get myself together for the class so I wanted to run through the walking foot (which I never use) and the free motion foot (which I have used) and that's when the wheels came flying off the bus!!! 

 

All of the sudden, I had skipped stitches and tension wackiness and some general machine weirdness!! ACK!!!!!!!   Some really creative words issued forth and after some unsuccessful machine wrestling, I threw in the towel. My DH gently broached the topic of what I was going to do given I had a machine quilting class in less than 2 hours and apparently a non-functioning machine.  Brave man!

 

I calmly explained that this is *exactly* why I have more than 1 sewing machine.  I made lunch, jumped in the shower, dressed, wound a few bobbins and gathered my supplies. And off I went to class ... with my Featherweight!! So there!