While waiting...

I’m still waiting for the new sewing machine, which is supposed to appear in my life sometime next week. Until then, I don’t want to sit idle, of course, and finished sewing another top, part 4 of the series “Shapes”.

By now I have realized that starting that file with a list of the finished quilts has been a vitally important idea in my preparations for Ste. Marie-aux-Mines. While I’m still not finished, at least I feel like I am beginning the see the silver lining on the horizon – counting 26, 27... However, I can’t just spend two weeks relaxing, and so after finishing the top yesterday I started quilting Play of Lines XXX today, with my little Bernina 930. This means that I had to choose another style of quilting than I had originally planned for, before the sewing machine drama took over. But assuming that getting aqcuainted with the new one might take a bit longer, I just didn’t want to take the risk of running into tights timewise and have opted to quilt Play of Lines XXX with the well known parallel lines. They work well, even if they are not as orginal as I would have wanted the quilting to be, and they can be done on this little machine with relative ease.

Except for the fact that the spools of my new threads don’t fit onto the machine. I did use some colors of my ‘old’ threads that had given me so many problems on the Janome, which fit fine onto the Bernina – and which didn’t break! – but in order to achieve a bit of variety I also wanted to include some of the newly bought threads as well. Then I remembered that Kathy Loomis had once written something about a ‘budget version’ for a spool stand on her blog. I couldn’t find the entry quickly to set a direct link, but I remembered enough to start fiddling with various materials in the house, included some hints once received by Barbara Lange about dealing with tension issues on older machines, and came up with this solution: the large cone is deposited in a plastic container, positioned right behind the motor of the machine,

and the thread is first led through the metal clip-parts of this large clip of which I don’t even remember the German name. 

Then threading continues normally, and voilá –

Play of Lines XXX - quilting in progress

slowly working along.