Goodbye, 2020

I did not get as far with the ruler work yesterday as I had hoped. When I sat down at the machine, I discovered that I had the wrong foot. Bernina, like many companies, wants you to use only their products, so they designed a proprietary foot system that looks nothing like the high- and low-shank feet more commonly used by other manufacturers. These feet are also insanely expensive. At some point, Bernina changed the design of the foot slightly. Even though none of my domestic machines are Berninas, I’ve run across enough Bernina accessories that I knew about difference in feet. One batch of machine accessories I purchased had over a dozen old-style Bernina feet, which I gave to my friend Susan because her beloved sewing machine is a Bernina Record from the 1970s.

I suspected that the store had given me the old-style #72 adjustable ruler foot instead of the new style #72 adjustable foot. I called the store and talked to one of the women there and she confirmed that there were two and I had probably gotten the wrong one, so I re-packaged the foot and headed back into town.

[At the same time, the husband was leaving to go back to the auto parts store, because he’s working on the backhoe and the store had sold him the wrong switch. Welcome to our world.]

The owner of the store was very apologetic and said she would mark the packages so that didn’t happen again. (The number on the old-style package is red and on the new-style package it is black, but otherwise, they were identical.) I came home, put the foot on, and prepared to quilt.

And then I got a thread jam in the bobbin area. I am not sure how it happened, but I stopped, cut the threads, cleared the jam (I thought), and rethreaded everything. At that point, though, the machine refused to move and flashed a picture of two gears on the screen. That’s it—a picture of two gears. I assumed it was an error message, so I looked at the troubleshooting section of the manual.

Nothing. No pictures, no description, nothing.

This is a machine with some fancy electronics under the hood. In these situations, turning off the machine and unplugging it will often reset the machine. I did that, turned the machine back on, and got a new (and terrifying) message:

Error: #2010 Maindrive sync failed! Restart Machine!

I tried again. Same message. Restarting the machine had no effect, despite the instructions to do so. This error message wasn’t in the manual, either. The needle would not move using the handwheel. I know better than to force something like that, so I left it.

I did a Google search on that error message. Nothing.

I checked the Bernina website. Nothing.

I called the store. They must have been busy because I was sent to voice mail. I left a message.

It occurred to me (finally) to search the Bernina Q Machines group on Facebook. Sure enough, there were a few posts from other people who had experienced the same problem. The fix—how hard would this be to put in the manual???—is to remove the bobbin and use the back handwheel (there is a back handwheel? yes there is, on the back side of the machine) to carefully turn the hook. I did that and a huge chunk of lint popped out. I brushed out the hook area again. I have been doing that regularly because this machine accumulates lint like nobody’s business, but I must have missed a spot. I also added a few drops of oil. This machine needs frequent oiling.

I turned the machine back on and breathed a sigh of relief when the home screen popped up. I had no further problems and was able to get the center of my practice square quilted. Then I had to make marks for the quilting on the inner border:

That’s a disappearing ink pen—the ink fades out with water.

Of course, marks only work if you follow them. I did the first pass around the border as instructed, but didn’t realize until I was three-fourths of the way through the second pass that I wasn’t following the same path. Can you tell?

I was supposed to go from border edge to the mark 1/2” from the border, not from border edge to border edge.

A mistake that is repeated over and over is thereinafter known as a “design element.”

I still have to do the outer border on this block, but at that point, it was late in the afternoon and I decided that I had earned my glass of wine.

The marks did fade out after spritzing with the water bottle. I think I will spray baste the next block, because this one shifted more than I liked:

By the end of this first session, I could feel the necessary motions settling into my brain. Instead of having both hands on the quilt, one hand has to be on the ruler to keep it in place. The trickiest part, by far, is eyeballing where to place the ruler. The ruler doesn’t indicate the stitching line—it cannot occupy the same space as the needle—so it has to be placed 1/4” from the stitching line. The edge of the ruler foot runs along the edge of the ruler. Quilters are ridiculously good at eyeballing a quarter inch, but even so, this was slow going at first. I also need to practice stitching in all directions. This is a small enough piece that I was able to turn it so that I was always stitching toward my body. I won’t be able to do that with a quilt. Toward the end of the inner border, I tried to practice keeping the block in the same position and stitching in different directions.

I think I am comfortable enough, though, that I can start quilting Noon and Night. The reason I got the adjustable ruler foot instead of the regular ruler foot is to accommodate the extra thickness of the two battings in that quilt.

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It’s only January, but we’re already making a to-do list for this spring. We decided that the husband needs a phone line out to the new shop. If he ever decides to run an auto repair business out of it, he’s going to need a separate number. He also needs internet access to work on electronic engine components. We could run things off the house, but I think a separate line makes more sense. I wish we had been thinking about that while we were building. Installing that has to wait, now, until the ground is soft enough for the husband to trench a line.

I am going to get my seed order in early this year. I saved a lot of seeds from last season’s crops, but still need a few things.

I want to call the woman who supplied us with piglets last year to make sure we get on her list for this year. We are on the calendar at the processor for the third week of October, so we’ll have to have piglets here no later than June 1 or so.

I hope I don’t have to hatch chicks again. That was fun but nervewracking.

I’ll talk about my sewing and quilting goals in the first couple of 2021 posts. I am still working on that list.

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The David Collum interview with Chris Martenson on Peak Prosperity has dropped. I know what I’ll be listening to this morning. See you next year. Stay safe.