Quilter, pharmacist, Gammill repair technician...

Yesterday I decided to load my friend Dyane's ultra modern quilt onto the Gammill and start quilting. Although I had no idea what design(s) I wanted to use, after looking at a couple modern quilting books, I soon knew exactly what I wanted to do!!

Once I got started, I was LOVING quilting this quilt!!

 BUT it was super hot in my quilting studio and when I was about half way through the quilt I decided to take a break and go for a swim to cool off. BIG MISTAKE!!

One thing led to another and I never got back to the quilt until this morning. The first stitch I took made a HUGE crunching noise and then I saw the needle broken off and curled into the shape of a "C". Not a good sign (and a big reason why I'm not that sad that I have to wear glasses LOL).

So, I put in a new needle, but the thread kept breaking and the machine was skipping stitches so I adjusted the tension and figured that I needed to "time" the needle and hook. After doing that the needle wouldn't bring up the bobbin thread. I changed the needle, but that was no help sooooo....I got out the manual and decided that maybe the impact of the needle break was so great that it had affect the height of the needle bar. I've had to fix this before, so no big deal, but I had to take off the faceplate in order to access the screw. Would any of my allen keys work for this??? Of course not, and so began the 10 minute search for my son's allen keys....

OK - faceplate off, needle bar height adjusted AND..... still the bobbin thread will only come up when there is no quilt under the needle. Soooo... I change the needle again and take off the throat plate to look at the timing again. It looks OK, but when I look straight on through where the bobbin usually sits, the needle is WAY too low now!! What is going on??? So I take the needle out and lay in down beside the other needle and it is almost 1/4" longer!! So, this is something I never realized before but Gammill needles are not a standard length. - good to know!

So,,, faceplate off again, needle bar height adjusted AGAIN. Timing adjusted AGAIN. And now the machine will quilt (thank god!!) but it is skipping stitches like crazy! And when I roll the quilt into the uptake bar at the back, there are little knots of thread on the back. And the thread STILL keeps breaking so I keep adjusting the tension and after two hours of this I decide that it is once again time for a swim!!

After cooling down (literally and figuratively) I went back to the Gammill and it was stitching a bit better. Well enough to finish the rest of the quilt although the thread probably broke 50 more times and I had to go back and re-stitch over places that it had skipped stitches.

The quilting looks really good on the front of the quilt dispite all of these issues, but tonight I will be spending the evening with my punchneedle thread and tweezers pulling the little knots on the back under the fabric. At the least the Olympics are on!! Go Canada Go!!