Can’t see the forest …

 

IMG_1336
Trees 1-4

… for the trees. That’s sort of the way I feel right now, after finishing the machine embroidery of some lovely Christmas trees; now I need to figure out how I want to set them into a quilt — the “forest”. 😉 These trees were inspired by a quilt my friend Phyl and I saw last February, so I bought the designs from Kreations by Kara.

Screen Shot 2016-06-15 at 7.40.59 AM

 

 

 

The next challenge was how to use metallic thread for some of the embroidery. I’d used Floriani metallic before for some free-motion quilting, and it was trouble-free. However, for some reason it kept kinking and then snapping and breaking when I tried to embroider. After trying everything suggested by the embroidery gurus at my local shop, Quiltique, without success, I finally began to think that the problem lay in how the thread was feeding from the spool. Pulling it from the top of the spool, either on a horizontal spool pin, a vertical one placed on the floor, or on the vertical one from the multi-spool holder seemed to have the same results: kinking and breaking. Logically, it looked like the thread needed to feed straight across from the spool to the tension, but it needed to feed sort of the same way a vacuum cleaner’s roll-up hose feeds from its mount. Phyl came up with a workable solution: wind the metallic onto a bobbin and feed that directly to the tension from a vertical pin. The only downside to that is that I had to guess how much thread I’d need so as not to waste too much or run out mid-tree. But someone else had apparently also run into this problem in the past and created a little tool that does exactly what’s needed: this spool pin adapter! This is a plastic tool, so some care is involved in not over tightening the screws and breaking them, but it works like a charm. Yay!

So now my trees are finished, and I’m pondering my layout with some sashing fabric I think will work. Stay tuned for the “forest”!

IMG_1337
Trees 5-8
IMG_1338
Trees 9-12

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

12 thoughts on “Can’t see the forest …”