The battle of the beleagured quilter

Job never had it as tortuous as the quiltmaker!! 
I don’t know whether it’s just me but it seems that the fabric, the machine, the thread, the needles, even the dratted pins have become  as stubbornly resistant to simple straightforward commands as the most truculent teenager testing the totally tolerant.   Every  needle suddenly has decided it’s a poker, or has the desire to become a  drill, hammering its way through the fabric.

And this is regardless of size, in fact some of the little ones are veritable Napoleons determined to blast through to the Moscow of the inner workings of the machine.

The fabric is  shredding itself madly along the edges while maintaining a concrete like  substance not 3 threads away!  The thread only has to look at the oncoming drill needle to dissolve into shreds and shards of its former self, making sure to do this well within the bowels of the tension system.

The pins glue themselves magnetically to everything in sight except the fabric and develop mysterious rust spots, strange kinks, blunt noses and even lose their heads!!  Then you see these rolling heads all over the carpet, but no bodies attached when you finally manage to pick them up!  And while a headless pin is awkward to use, a bodiless head is of no more value than an ice cube in Siberia. Furthermore, they jump!!  As fast as you pick them up, they’re leaping off your hand ready to wink at you from the floor “maybe I’m a pin!!, come get me!”

The needle has developed a strange desire to push as much cloth through the needle plate as it can, rivaling the packing of carry on bags to avoid extra fees at the airport.  If not burying cloth like a demented dog with a bone, then it’s folding it into little Fortuny pleats – perhaps this is the long lost technique!

  Irons no longer smooth out the world’s creases, they’re just namby pamby, lily livered, luke warm successors of their furnace-like forebears!

The scissors are sharing an invisibility cloak between them, except the ones that were used to test the cuttability of pins by enquiring baby engineers! 

I keep wondering how Job actually made it through, did he emerge from the whale with a finished quilt, oh no! that was Jonah!! Where are my patience and fortitude now when I need them the most?  I think it’s time for a cuppa tea, don’t you? (or maybe something stronger?)

 

 

 

And, if you have been, thanks for reading!!! Let me know if  the instruments in your life are as rebellious as mine!!

Elizabeth