We bought our baby years ago. Over the years, we've gotten used to her. We know her little idiosyncrasies. We know how to keep her happy. We even take her in from time to time for Paul to take her temperature and give her a little check-up. We're good to her and she's been good to us.
We were stitching right along this week, machine quilting on our Say Cheese quilt. Everything was going fine until we had to re-fill the bobbin. Right away, she started to skip a stitch here and a stitch there. Darn! Now what?
So, just like with a baby, we started to think about the possibilities... is she hungry? is she wet? is she teething?
We changed the needle. Nope. We checked to see it was threaded correctly. Nope. Tension problem with the newly-wound bobbin? Nope. Bobbin thread OK? Nope. Hmmmmmm. We called it a day and hoped it fixed itself overnight. Stranger things have happened. Can't do that with a human baby though. :)
So, this morning we sat down again. Still skipping stitches. Darn!
We'll just have to dig a little deeper. This time we removed the bobbin and the bobbin case and lookey what we saw!! Lint!! And plenty of it. All that stitching on the WhirlyGiggle quilt had produced a lot of lint. Some little chunks of it were even on the ledge that supports the bobbin making it uneven. We cleaned it out, put everything back and held our breath while we tried again.
Success!
Oh yeah - nothing like a d&c (dusting and cleaning). I know my machine needs it when the noise it makes while sewing absolutely resembles the opening music to M.A.S.H. You know... when the choppers come in from over the hills? lol
ReplyDeleteMonika
I pull out the dust around the bobbin case every couple of weeks. and like Monika says, as soon as it starts making that choppy sound... It is a relief though when you can fix your own problem like that and not have to fork out the $$$ for some guy to look at it
ReplyDeleteWhenever I sew quilt batting I know that my machine will need a good and thorough cleaning after. Learnt that lesson the same way you did!
ReplyDelete