Hi butterflywing,
The website that you pm'd (Y.G.) me has a tutorial by Joe that may help.

that was my next step. thanks.

i'm going to have that same problem soon myself. i'll be trying invisible thread for the first time.

i couldn't find that tutorial, but i found some other answers and passed them along. she can't join yahoo groups because she doesn't have yahoo!

i just heard from her and her heart is beating again, but she does have to remove the stitches from about 7/8 of a large lap quilt.

she has been having trouble with the regular-size spools of coats/clarks
signature quilting threads. not with the thread itself, but the spool has those little bumps around the top edge and also the notch for the end of the thread. the way the tin lizzie winds off the spool is straight up, so her thread was catching on all those things. so she bought something called a 'spool cap' (i think - maybe a 'thread cap'?) which holds the thread away from the bumps. when she realized that that was the only thing that was different, she took off that cap. duh! and voila! everything is copacetic once
again. :thumbup: :thumbup:

Glad to hear that she figured out what the problem was.
Just wanted to thank you for those websites, they've been a great help with my TL 18 !!! :D