The Cost of Hurrying

Back in January, I set myself the goal of finishing “Forest Floor” (my maple-leaf quilt) by September of this year. I gave myself nine months to free-motion quilt and bind it. Plenty of time. When August hit, I was no where near finished, but I wanted to do what I could to work towards my goal.

Unfortunately, I spent the first two weeks of August sick with COVID. My recovery has been glacial. This enormous quilt is physically draining to work on, so I didn’t get back to it until the very end of the month.

I’m explaining all this so you understand how I got in a hurry. Why I rushed. Why I ignored the warning signs and added hours of work to a project that already feels like it is taking forever. (I started on it in 2001 and really want to get it done before I hit a quarter of a century.)

Last week, when I reacquainted myself with the quilt, I discovered that all the maple leaf blocks were nearly done. It took me about half an hour to finish the rest of the center section.

I was ecstatic. “I finished the center! All that’s left is the borders!”

(Experienced quilters are face-palming right now, because borders take way longer than you’d think. My quilt is an extreme example. The borders take up 55% of the total area, so I was really only 45% done. But I felt like I only had a few hours of sewing left. Ha.)

Having the end in sight fired me up. I dove into the next section of free-motion quilting, determined to finish. I came up with a design for the flying-geese border blocks and started sewing. When I noticed thread coming up from the bottom on my circles, I reduced the top thread tension to fix the problem. (More on this later.)

Before long, the machine started skipping stitches. I needed to replace the needle or at least clean the machine, but I wasn’t about to stop. I had a quilt to finish. So I kept going, telling myself that, unless the stitches got too long, it wouldn’t matter if a couple were missing.

I got through two blocks, knowing there were at least three places the stitches had skipped, and telling myself these were acceptable flaws. Nothing to worry about. I could live with it.

Then I turned the quilt over and discovered a mass of thread nests and loops.

While I had talked myself into ignoring a few skipped stitches, I couldn’t live with the mess. Loose threads catch on things and eventually pull out or tear the fabric. You do not want loops hanging off your quilt.

With a profound sigh, I got out the seam ripper. I spent five hours picking out fifteen minutes of machine quilting.

The worst of it? The thread nest problem was my fault. After I took the sewing machine apart, cleaned it, and put in a new needle, I quilted a sample to check the tension.

There were loops on the back, meaning that the top tension was too loose. A little adjusting and it was sewing perfectly again. Earlier, when I tweaked the tension without verifying it before continuing? I set up my own quilting disaster.

The final slap in the face was realizing that the problem I was trying to fix when I first tweaked the tension was caused by — you guessed it — rushing. I was moving my hands too fast, pulling the bobbin thread to the top of the quilt. So the real fix to the problem — all my problems, really — was to slow down.

I’m finally back on track with the quilt. The machine is working fine and I’m taking my time with the quilting. I plan on cleaning the machine every time I change a bobbin, even though that’s insanely often. The minute it starts skipping stitches, I will stop and change the needle.

From now on, I will go slowly. I don’t want to pay the impatience tax again.