Ever had One of Those Days??

Ever had one of those days when you should have just stopped and gone for a walk? or baked cookies? or read a book? Anything but quilt??

Well I did!
Yesterday I decided that I had a whole day with no particular commitments, which doesn't often happen, so I would start the FMQ on Daydream..

I had just gotten "Jenny" (my Janome) back from her annual cleaning/check-up so I thought she would be excited to be back in action too.

I loaded up lots of bobbins, got my little quilting gloves on and sat down with my cup of coffee near at hand. Well, that was as good as it got!

My thread kept breaking...shredding actually. And it skipped stitches sometimes.  I have never had a problem with Jenny doing this before. I tried ever suggestion I could find.

• I changed the needle, 
• tried a different size needle, 
• rethreaded the machine (like a billion times!!) ,
•  tried cotton thread, 
• tried poly thread, 
• I tried flipping over the spool of thread so it wound off the other direction,
• I tried adjusting the tension. (although the tension looked ok..no thread showing on top or bottom)

Nothing seemed to help. So I phoned the dealer (who had just serviced the machine) to see if she had any other ideas.  I must admit she gasped a little when I said that I always have done my FMQ without dropping the feed dogs....so I even tried dropping the feed dogs!

The only other suggestion that she had was that it could be the batting! She said some batting has little flecks of particles that may be causing a problem.  Have you ever heard of that ?? I am sure that I have used this batting before and have never had any of these issues.

And there is more....

I decided to try my old Pfaff, even though I don't like FMQ on that machine. Of course the bobbins from the Janome don't fit in the Pfaff! So I had to rewind some onto a Phaff bobbin. 

It seemed to work better,except for this little glitch..

but that was my fault, and we won't even talk about that!!
Then, can you believe it...I ran out of top thread (white !) REALLY!???

Oh, and there is still more...

If I hadn't been so busy re-threading my machine I would have noticed that I wasn't having to take out many pins as I went along....which I only realized after I took the quilt off to look at what I had done.... WOW!!!

I hadn't fully basted the quilt....I am sure that I must have run out of pins, and thought that I would come back and finish it when I had quilted something else and had some extra pins to use. Except, it has been sitting around so long that I forgot! What kind of idiot wouldn't check?? Well I guess I would be that kind of idiot!!
So now I have a WRINKLE in the backing!!! I have always been so careful, and have never had a wrinkle before. I am so "choked" as my kids would say. 

So after a moment when I decided that it was ruined and I should just give up on this....I took a deep breath and had a closer look...

OK maybe it is not totally ruined....

I picked a bit of the stitching out, and it helped smooth out the wrinkle a little, but because I was stopping and starting so much, the stitches are pretty dense in places. 

I re-pinned the whole quilt...now with a bezillion pins...boy is that going to be a pain in the neck when I get going on this again!!!

I went to the fabric store and bought several spools of white thread!

I put everything away....maybe it will work fine the next time I try this????  Or else this was just a bad dream and I will wake up and have a good laugh about it!