HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Here we are in the new year.  What's nice about it this year for me is that a lot of my busyness, particularly in music, is behind me and I finally have time to finish up a few knitting and sewing projects.

On December 31 I finished the second pair of socks for the Dear One:

I made a few slight adjustments to the pattern, and these fit even better than the first pair:

 

I shortened the foot part just a little, flattened out the heel cup just a little and added 10 rows of plain knitting at the ankle before beginning the ribbing.  He really loves these hand knit socks for their warmth and comfort.

And LeeAnn had another finish!  Not a quilt this time, but a very beautiful afghan.  I'm not sure what you call this kind of work, but it is basically a type of embroidery with yarn on a white, woven background.  She used some variegated thread for the more detailed parts, and a straight blue for the open diamonds.  You should see it in person, as it is simply beautiful!  You can tell from the fact that it requires three women to hold it up that it's really large.

Here's a close up of the stitching:

 

This picture doesn't do justice to the beautiful colours in the variegated yarn.  

And this week I finished a "donation" quilt that I started here last year.  I'm doing the machine quilting, a simple, large meander, which I usually enjoy.  But I've had mega problems with the thread breaking.  A large frizzy area develops above the needle and then the thread breaks, again and again and again.

I did the usual steps to correct the problem: rethread top and bottom, change to a new needle, etc.  Nothing helped.  It was really frustrating!  Today I had another idea.  Here's how the thread was situated atop the machine:

 

It's a big spool and the thread tends to fall off because it's quite slippery.  That's why it's on top of the machine and not on its side where the thread is ordinarily positioned.  Every now and then when the thread coming off the spool was at the bottom it would give a jerk on the spool.  Could that be the problem?

I thought of winding some on a bobbin and trying that:

 

That helped a lot!  But then it had this problem, when the bobbin was quite full, the thread would fall off the bobbin and get tangled around the spindle that was holding the bobbin.  So a further fix was needed.  I thought of placing the thread somewhere away from the machine, but don't have one of those thread holders that work in that way.  So this is what I tried:

 

And that worked!  Just the little bit of extra weight on top put enough drag on the bobbin that the thread fed smoothly!  Relief!

Now all the machine quilting is finished.  Tomorrow I will trim off the extra batting and backing and bind the edges.  I'll show you the finished quilt when it's completed.