There is a running joke about me and seam rippers. I even have a mini quilt on the wall, made by a dear friend, that is a paper pieced seam ripper. I hate to rip. I will do a lot of things to avoid ripping. That being said, there are times when it is just necessary and I have to suck it up and do what is right.

I tried a new design on the long arm over the holiday. I have wanted to do a nice Baptist Fan for ages, and I got a design and gave it a whirl. I need to note that this is a tricky pattern, as the rows have to nest exactly for it to look right and in 14 years of owning a long arm I have never been successful at doing this.

It was with great trepidation and excitement that I got a pattern and of course, started it off on an important quilt, not on a practice quilt. I’m not sure what is wrong, but it wouldn’t sew off. Keeps saying there’s an obstruction and it stops. I think somehow it’s a combination of the speed of the machine and the long sweeping arcs of the pattern because the error always happens on the outermost two bands of each fan. EVERY TIME. Oh my lamb chops, I was tearing my hair out. One third of the way in to the first row, I realized that I was not going to be able to figure this out right now, and that this wasn’t the quilt to do the figuring on. So I started over using a design that I know my machine loves to sew out and it went without a single hitch (which is another sign that it’s something with that design, not a problem with my machine alone).

So now I have a completely quilted quilt, with 1/3 of the first row that includes a badly formed baptist fan. Heavy sigh as I contemplate the seam ripper. I spent 4 hours last night sitting in my big chair with the TV on while I painstakingly removed the quilting stitch by stitch. I know for me it is much easier to do that when I can manipulate the quilt instead of leaving it on the farm and picking it out there, but what a nightmare. I’m probably about 75% of the way done picking out just that 1/3 of a row, but it will be so worth it. I keep telling myself that over and over.

I’m going to have to go back with something that matters far less and try to figure out what is wrong with the fan design. When I just trace the pattern (computer only, no needle running) it traces fine, so I suspect that the speed is too great on the longest arcs, so the needle drags just enough to make the machine think it has hit an obstruction so it throws an error. I have some ideas on how to counter act that problem but it’s going to take some practical testing to figure that out.

This hits the big question in my quilting life. I want it to be easy. I don’t want to have to test on 3 different quilts to figure out exactly how I have to hold my mouth to sew this pattern off. On the other hand, knowing how to combat this behavior for a pattern with long arcs that could move too fast would be really useful knowledge. I need to suck it up and do this but I need to do some research first so I have some clue of what I’m doing. In the mean time, I still have a lot of ripping to do…..