Or if it suits your style, maybe you sing to the good ol’ Hee Haw ditty with the cute little blonde girl? You know, the one with her bouncy pageboy haircut, and smiley-happy-face, a big toothy grin, and she would say, “I’m a grinnin'” and then Roy Clark would chime in, saying “And I’m a pickin’! Whatever… either way works for me. It’s how I keep myself entertained while “I’m a pickin.” Yup… doesn’t take much!
I dearly love to quilt words… but it is truly one of the hardest things for me to do, mentally, and while quilting, too. It can be really difficult for my mind to stay with the letters, the correct spelling… and order of words once I ‘get into the zone’ of free motioning. Yup. It’s a multi-task of great proportion for me personally! So in my latest quilt project “Store Up Treasures” I found I had to rip ~ TWICE! Ugh. Once because the tension was messed up.. and second, because I MESSED UP!
Anyway! Recently, I was shown that the easiest way to remove stitches, which is to start pickin’ from the back-side of the project, first. And if you should snag a fiber, instead of a thread, it’s on the wrong side, and won’t show, (or at least not so much).
I had thread tension issues on the back side of stitching the words on this piece “Store Up Treasures.” And I don’t like it much. Stitching is going along just fine, but then I switch threads, and sometimes my tension is too tight all of a sudden. On my 830 machine, it usually means I may have accidentally threaded my tension discs for for the embroidery module. Sometimes it just gets tight for no good reason. And I think almost everyone experiences this once in a while. And I do a couple things to troubleshoot and correct it:
Once you do yer pickin’ from the back, you can do yer grinnin’ when the front stitches practically just fall off!
Til next time, I’m laughing (at myself)… and loving… out loud. LLOL! Thanks for stopping by!
XO
Leslie
Comments 4
I should pre test more and then I'd not have to cut the back threads. At least pulling out the top is fairly quick then.
A trick I learned a few years ago is to break the thread on the backside of the quilt at every third stitch. That way you can pull the the front thread out whole.
I think we all know about taking out stitches, more than once on the same item!! Oh yeah, been there. I found that if I have a lot of stitches to take out, I also cut the stitches from the back and then I you only have the top thread to pull out, to pick up all the little threads front or back I use painters tape, just stick it on and the thread comes off with it.
I've learned the hard way recently too that I must always use a test fabric, but it's not always exactly the same as what I'm stitching on.
Sometimes I need to change a needle too, especially if it's painted fabric.
When I'm really crabby about picking, I might put a Quilting Art TV DVD on to take my mind off it.