Pure Frustration!!
Yesterday was one of those days you'd rather just forget about. 1st off I'm working on my 3rd quilt on the frame and hoping to finish by the end of this month but it doesn't look like I'll make my goal. I'm now working on the Abstraction lap quilt and I knew what I wanted to do on the large corners and I got the top 2 done but it took quite a while to do them as I had to advance to get the last part of the patterns stitched. I'm using the words "Love, Hope, Peace and Joy" on a slant as the area is basically a triangle and it's over 26 inches long at the bottom and my machine will only do 22 inches at a time. I worked putting the words together evenly spaced and level before turning them 45 degrees to fit the area. And of course each word was created by whomever so you couldn't connect the words so they would continue stitching. It was a lot of stop, tie off, go to the next word, tie off, stitch, stop, tie off and so on but I got it done and I'm happy with how they turned out.
Then came the body of the quilt and I made a layout beforehand but realized it wouldn't work as planned so went to Plan B and those patterns didn't work for me either so I started searching thru my patterns on the IQ tablet for a pantagraph that would look good with the words and what I ended up using for the small border. That also had to be changed from what I thought I was going to use. Finally found the pantagraph, set it up blocking sections around the body of the quilt so that I could stitch them out with the silver thread and the body of the quilt in a pale blue thread.
Realized I'd made the blocks for those special sections incorrectly after I'd cut out the body of the pantagraph so had to start over but here's the frustration, I couldn't remember where I found that pantagraph so had to search all over again. I spent 5 hours searching and placing the patterns just so only to delete them and start over. I finally found what I thought was the pattern and I wrote it down this time.
I was able to stitch out 2 rows of the pantgraph but I was having issues with the thread snapping on me so I changed the needle as I'd quilted 2 lap quilts with that needle. Well, that didn't seem to help so once I finally got done with the 2nd row, I placed the spools of thread along with the filled bobbins in the freezer over night as I've read that will put moisture into the thread. This is Aurifil thread so I didn't expect to have issues with it plus it's been kept in the closed drawer too. So hopefully today will be a better day for quilting.
On a good note, for those with an Innova frame, I read on the Innova Facebook page about changing out the gas lifters on the ends of the belly bar ordering from Amazon or an auto store. I don't have access with Amazon so I went to my local Napa Auto store and ordered a set of the gas lifters, paid much less than what the Innova website was charging. I'd taken my original gas lifter with me with all the dimensions stated on the Facebook page and they looked identical. I popped one on yesterday and it works like a charge. I was able to save myself over $40 by ordering thru the auto store so YEAH for me.