Is that Miss Piggy?

I finished baking my bread and had it cooling on the counter when my husband walks into the kitchen and asks me what the piggy was doing on the end.  I truly had not noticed before he asked, and sure enough, the little third loaf that was left after the two full loaves, turned out looking like Miss Piggy sitting next to the other two.  The Anadama Bread turned out awesome.  I definitely will be making that again real soon.

I have been aware since I bought my Baby Lock sewing machine that it is very sensitive to dust and lint, which means I try to stay ahead of any build-up in the bobbin area.  Computerized machines don't have lots of other areas that you can access.  There are two ways that I do this necessary task.  The first is the quick one that helps me determine whether I have to resort to the more thorough method.  With the quick method I open the easy access plate that slides out and I use a pipe cleaner to pick up the lint and dust that is present.  I do usually also take out the bobbin case and dust that area as well.  If there was not much of a build-up, I put the bobbin case back in and slide the plate in place and I am ready to sew again.  If I extract lots of lint, it is usually an indication that I need to unscrew the metal plate that gives me access to the area under the needle and behind.

This looks like a pretty messed up stitch swatch.  What I was doing was trying to figure out why my bobbin thread was showing on top.  Yesterday I had a project that I used orange in the bobbin and I had yellow for the top thread and I was doing a blanket stitch around an applique piece.  The orange ended up predominant on the topside.  I have had issues for a while and could not figure out how to adjust the bobbin tension on this machine, so I decided I would let it go.  Most of the time I am using the same color top and bottom so it is not as obvious. Well this morning I wanted to use a zig-zag stitch on another project.  I thought it best to do a test first and as you can see on the left, it was not a normal zig-zag.  The middle rows are my attempts at changing the settings that I found did not resolve the issue. My husband asked what the manual suggested... I had not looked there.  I have a tendency to think I know all I need to know about sewing machines, and the reminder came back to me... You learn something new every day!

While I was checking the manual my husband was checking to see what info he could come up with online.  Seems one of the tips he ran across is that you should never thread your machine with the presser foot down.  In this position the tension disks are engaged and the thread does not ride in the path where it is intended.  That is not to say that it can't get in there with the presser foot down, but it could present an issue.  I rethreaded my machine with the presser foot up... but I also read in my machine's manual that I should take the bobbin case out and run a piece of paper behind the tension spring.  Now I do this on my machines with bobbin cases I have to take out to put the bobbin in... in  fact I do it frequently, but I never thought of it being an issue with a drop-in bobbin.  Running the paper... actually I ended up using a pointed cut piece of an old credit card (this is what I use on my longarm) I found a fair amount of lint that I had no idea was there.  The last little row of stitches on the right was after my new adjustments.

I think I may have used minky on a baby blanket or two, but until recently I had not thought of using it on the back of a regular size quilt.  My daughter has been doing a few quilts on my longarm and she likes to use minky on the back of lots of her quilts.  I have done two with minky recently myself, and I have to say I was surprised how nice they turned out.  So soft and warm... toasty warm according to my Grand-daughter.  This quilt I even turned the back to the front for the binding.  The nice thing about minky is it comes about 57" wide which means that I did not have to piece the width of the quilt because this one was lap size.  Doesn't get much easier than this.  Only problem I have now is I may have to make a lap quilt with minky on the back for Ron.