Don't even get me started.

I can't count the number of times I started tearing up this weekend on one hand.

I was thrilled at my progress yesterday, I was rocking my monochromatic quilt, piecing the back, and then starting the quilting. And then the snags came. And the puckers. I have never used my seam ripper so much. Finally, I was able to get it in the washer to wash out the orange chalk I had used. I took it out and hung it to dry on our shower curtain rod. The horror. Stains were appearing out of nowhere, and mind you the thing is yellow. At one point I told my husband I thought there was a ghost messing with me. Every time I looked at it, there was a new stain. This morning, I take down the quilt to shake it out and finish the drying in our dryer, and I figured out what the ghost was.



That's right, the curtain rod it was hanging on. Black. Greasy. Dust. Everywhere. Emergency trip to CVS for stain remover, another wash on warm, and a deep breath later, the stains were gone. You can imagine, after all this hard work, how much of a wreck I was.  I literally had a conversation with the curtain rod, telling it how worthless it was.

I tried to recoup with some FMQ to finish our picnic blanket / Sliced Coins quilt. Relief it was not. The top thread kept breaking. Over and over and over. I tried every tension setting I could, I changed from cotton to poly thread, I changed bobbins twice. I changed needles twice. I put the feed dogs up, I put them back down. Nothing was working. I had taken my machine apart, removed all the covers, and tried to get the thing to repeat the breakage with my husband watching. It happened, I picked everything up, and finally realized that the thread was snagging just below the needle plate.



See that? The teeny tine little metal shard sticking out? That's the culprit for my 2+ hours of frustration. Apparently my needle had at one time gouged a cylinder out of the plate.  I grabbed my metal nail file and got rid of that thing. Another deep breath, and all was well.

Ugh, if you made it through that, thanks for letting me vent my sewing frustrations. The exciting part is, with all this work, I have a few things to share this week!

Have a great Monday :) (isn't that the ultimate oxymoron?)

Mary