Have you ever considered how much power a small, seemingly insignificant decision can have? Even when you’ve thought and planned and imagined what the outcome would be, sometimes the smallest little pebble can make the deepest waves. There are times you can move backward and reassess, and then make changes and move on in a different direction. But sometimes, for either good or ill, you’re stuck with it, as well as all of the other decisions you’re then forced to make because of the first one.

Don’t get me wrong, some small decisions turn out well or even better than planned, and have positive effects on other things, and we call those “good” and perhaps even “serendipitous.” It’s the ones that have, dare I say it, possible negative effects, that I’m concerned with today, and we call those decisions “hasty” or “rash.” Funny ol’ world, isn’t it?

Friday evening I was bound a determined to progress on this quilt, and I was at a point where I didn’t know where to go next. I know how I want to quilt certain part of the quilt, but some parts are still a bit fuzzy, and have to wait until others are quilted to see how it looks. I’d finished the quilting in the medallions, adding a little clamshell edge just around the inside edge of the ovals, which added the perfect finishing detail to the radiating lines. (Okay, so that was a hasty good decision. )

I decided to start adding the little tiny pearls quilting at the very edge of the green border, since that was a plan from the beginning. Problem was, I didn’t know exactly what color thread to use. Choosing one and diving in, I quilted about 25 of these little, teensy, tiny circles, and then decided they were the wrong color thread, and had to spend at least an hour taking out microscopic stitches in silk thread. NOT fun. Gee, if I’d tried the circles first on the sample, I’d have known that the color wasn’t right, but did I do that? Nah. A hasty decision with negative results. Read the rest of this entry »

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As I sit at the machine quilting The Misery Quilt, I remember with great fondness the days years ago before my hands began sending me these hard to ignore signals that say “stop, you’re hurting me!” While I was quilting the endless stippling on Stars in My Hand, I had to cut down my daily time at the machine to about 30 minutes because that amount of time was about all I could do without pain. I said to myself and others that when the quilt was done, I’d take a break and maybe go in a different direction with my quilting, some direction that didn’t involve tiny stippling on king size quilts.

I did take a break, but the direction didn’t change much. I made Grasping Reality, which had some stippling but it was a larger size pattern, and a smaller quilt overall. I don’t remember having too many hand signals with that quilt. Since then, I’ve finished a few of the projects on the Creativity List, none of which had tiny stippling, though some were quite large. Other than that, I’ve worked on this Misery Quilt since early 2007, so I’ve definitely taken a step back in the productivity department. Unfortunately, despite taking it slow (not always intentionally, as my posts about The Misery Quilt can attest to), it seems that I’m back in the same position I was in before, with a large quilt that needs lots of detailed stitching.

Since I hadn’t planned lots of stippling on this quilt, maybe not any, I thought I would be okay. Now I’ve discovered that while tiny stippling can make my hands hurt pretty fast, other small, detailed patterns can be just as painful, especially if I’m working near the center of a large quilt, where just holding on to the quilt and keeping it in position on the machine bed takes Herculean strength sometimes. And just for the record, when I started this quilt, I didn’t know how bad my hands would turn out to be, nor how big it would end up; I made the center star in the fall of 2004 I think, and it sat until late 2006 or early 2007 when I started thinking about finishing it up again. The design just grew, and Bob’s your uncle, now here we are and the quilt and I are fighting to see who’ll break first. Read the rest of this entry »

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When I was twelve and I asked my mom to teach me to sew, one of the first lessons was how to use her Riccar sewing machine. It was a pretty high-end model, built to last, and as far as I know, still runs great. The only thing I specifically remember from that lesson was my mother’s stern admonition: “Never, NEVER, turn the hand wheel backwards.” She threatened me with death if I did it, and demonstrated how to turn the handwheel properly. She meant that the handwheel on the machine should never be turned away from me as I was seated at the machine, and she explained that that would cause the threads to tangle and possibly break the machine.

Many years later, I was quite surprised by how many people I saw doing just that in classes, and wondering why the threads were all jammed up and they couldn’t get the fabric out of the machine. I guess they missed that part of the lesson? More recently, I’ve (carefully) risked my mother’s wrath by turning the handwheel on my Pfaff backwards just one half of a complete turn, to get the needle to come back up without completing the stitch if I’ve taken just that one stitch too many (or the stitch landed in the wrong place) when I’m machine quilting. (Theoretically my mother wouldn’t care anymore, since it’s not her costly machine I’d be breaking, but do me a favor and keep my malefaction between you and me!)

One half of a complete rotation of the handwheel doesn’t seem to damage the machine, but frequently it will tangle the threads, so sometimes the technique works and other times it doesn’t. If it works, I’ve saved myself taking out a whole line of machine quilting because there’s one wrong stitch at the end. If it doesn’t, sometimes I can keep stitching (and ignore the little jig of the misplaced stitch or try to work it into the design somehow) and other times the threads are so tangled that stopping and restarting is the only option. It’s a 50-50 chance with the Pfaff. Read the rest of this entry »

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