I have several things to talk about today. One of them is the frustration I have had in making my second pillowcase dress! Of course the second dress is not made due to those frustrations. I have a 4 needle embroidery machine which is very nice…I can put 4 colors of thread on it and let it go with the embroidery. The embroidery design I am using for the second dress has 5 colors in it and the color #1 is a shade of green that I would describe as between green and teal. It is beautiful and I assumed that the spool I had was one of the best threads I could use. But, low and behold, I was constantly re-threading my needle. The thread continuously shredded every few stitches. This is very frustrating and annoying. Of course, there are several things that can cause shredding of the thread, so I tried everything I could think of such as changing the needle, turning the thread over, running floss through the thread track, etc. I thought I had done everything to stop the thread shred, but no. Just more frustration. Then the fact that I didn’t have the same color thread in a different brand meant I had to wait to go to a fabric store to get another color. So I gave up for a few days. I finally got to the fabric store on Friday, but did not have a chance to test out the new thread until Sunday afternoon. But the first thing that happened was that the thread shredded! Boy I am going to give up on this design if the new thread does this same thing! But I found that the thread had been caught in spring thus shredding it! So, I am optimistic that this will work this week! My plan is to have 2-3 pillowcase dresses finished by the weekend! Wish me luck!
The other thing I want to talk about is the danger of taking a husband to the fabric store. Not only is it distracting to see him seemingly bored and just wandering. This causes a person to think they need to hurry up and get him out! Well, before we got out of the store he discovered this machine that could cut fabric and was electric! Looked nice, and boy was the price right. It was a $90 machine marked down to $25. Now really, that should have been a clue that something was wrong, but he seemed so excited and he picked it up and said “happy anniversary”. Well, this is not quite what I wanted for my anniversary, but it was just kind of cute that he thought he was getting me the best gift he could find! I think he has a hard time figuring out what to get me sometimes! Anyway, we bought the machine and a table to fit around it that was also marked down dramatically. I didn’t have a chance to use the machine until Sunday afternoon, so I was anxious to see how well it would cut fabric. I pulled it out and plugged it in, stepped on the foot pedal, and ran a piece of fabric through it. It did nothing! So, I went back to the 1 page instruction that was included with the unit and discovered that I needed to tighten a screw. So I found the flat head screwdriver and set about tightening it. Now I run another piece of fabric through and it came out looking like a perforated piece of paper. So I was able to pull the pieces of fabric apart, but should I have to do that with a fabric cutter??? So back to the instruction paper and tightening the unit again, but when I turned the screw to tighten it I watched it turn itself back! That isn’t good. So I tried and tried and got nothing but perforated fabric! So to the computer I went to look up information about this fabric cutter and what did I find? 13 bad reviews! and 3 good reviews! This is not encouraging to me at all. All the “bad” reviews stated the same issues I was having. It seemed to be more work than it should be to cut a piece of fabric! So, I packed it back up in the box and will return it to the store and hopefully get my money back. Wish me luck! And don’t fall for too good to be true bargains!
Sorry my pictures are not coming out as good as they used to…my camera is in my car and I have used my phone to take the pictures…obviously not a high quality camera!
