Biggest Quilting News Ever!

How d'ya like that headline? I hope it conveys the nearly unbridled excitement I am feeling over this latest development.

I AM QUILTING ON MY LONG-ARM MACHINE!!!

Yes, you read that right. After two years of inactivity, false starts, excuses, and issues, all systems are going. Successfully. And below are the first few stitches of what I hope will be many thousands of stitches yet to come.

It's been a long journey, one that has been precisely two years coming to fruition. On November 16, 2017, DH and I drove over to Sharon and Fred's to inspect the long arm she was giving me. Yes, that's right, Sharon GAVE me her long-arm quilting machine. We went to assess its size and to establish a plan for dismantling, moving and reassembling it. Read about that in this post.

Fred and Sharon behind the Tin Lizzie.

Table parts ready for assembly in our basement.

The machine moved to our house on December 8, 2017. We did a good job of assembling it in a timely manner. I was motivated to quilt! After assembly, however, I found many excuses for not quilting. It was daunting! Checking tension, checking needle, threading correctly, loading a quilt correctly, skipping stitches, watching videos, questioning friends. I was overwhelmed and easily discouraged, and consequently, I would leave it for months at a time.

One major problem was that we put the machine in our partially finished basement. It is a clutter catch-all, often damp and chilly, and since we spend very little time down there, we have all manner of dust and detritus. Every fall, we battle mice. Even with all these negatives, DH and I worked like crazy to clean up and clear out the space so that it would be a more pleasant place to work. And in June, I actually loaded a quilt onto the machine. I was GOING to quilt, by gosh! Here's the post for that.

And then I saw a snake. Eww! (He came in through the washing machine drain.) And then I saw mouse droppings. Eww! Before you go thinking we live in a ramshackle sty, let me assure you these creatures go hand-in-hand with country living. Farmland surrounds us, and we have a fair amount of wooded land on our property. We are remote, for sure. Anyway...

Is it any wonder I didn't relish going downstairs to quilt? It creeped me out to think of working in that basement. Until we do some major remodeling, that's just a fact.

Then DH and I had a light bulb moment -- we would dismantle one of our extra bedrooms and move the Tin Lizzie upstairs beside my existing sewing room. Having all sewing and quilting located in adjacent rooms made so much better sense. Why it took so long to come up with this is beyond me, but gosh, once the idea was out there, we really went to work to make it happen. Click back to this post from October first, when we were in the midst of transitioning.

As the bedroom parts were moved out and the long arm parts were moved in, I washed everything with disinfectant before proceeding with reassembly. The photo above shows the frame and machine in its new home, with the quilt draped over the bars in front. With a clean machine in a clean room, I was ready to quilt! Oooh, the excitement!

That plan was soon dashed as my stitches were a mess. I did all sorts of trouble shooting on my own, but this was a bigger problem than I could fix. I called Terry over at the McArthur Quilt Shop, who services Tin Lizzies. After describing the issue to him over the phone, he made a conjecture that there was a problem with an encoder. I needed to take it in for him to look at. This involved, naturally, removing the quilt from the frame, dismantling the machine from the table, lugging it and the roller platform to the car, and driving an hour east to McArthur. That picture above is my dear Tin Lizzie in the back of the car ready for its trip to the fix-it shop.

And I had to do it twice. The first trip fixed the encoder, yet back here set up and ready to quilt, I still had issues. The side-to-side quilting worked great; the front-to-back quilting - ehh, not so much. It made only a couple of correct stitches and then a big long stitch and then the machine just stopped running. So I called Terry again, described this new issue; "it must be in the wiring" he hypothesized, and yes, the machine had to return to McArthur.

And that is how I spent Saturday morning, exactly two years from the date we first went to see the machine at Sharon and Fred's.

Now, for the good news! It's fixed! Terry was fantastic! He did not charge me for that second visit, and solved the issue - bonus: I shopped for fabric while he worked his magic. Back here at home, I put it all back together again, reattached the quilt for the umpteenth time, and took some stitches.

Success! I was quilting! I did a bit Saturday night and finished it Sunday night. Just before bedtime, I removed my first finished quilt from the Tin Lizzie, and ceremoniously spread it out on our bed for inspection.

Here are some glamour shots taken this morning. I couldn't help myself - I took a lot. This is Moda Love.  Click here for the details on it.

And thus, a new chapter begins here at Jayne's Quilting Room. For my entire quilting life, I have made quilt tops, and have two closets full (well, not full) to prove it. It will be fun revisiting each of these creations as I work my way through the quilting process on them all.

Happy, happy, happy quilting, Friends!