Willpower Recovery Rolls - I botch them

The vacation sewing is not going according to plan.  At all.

About a week and a half ago, I bought a brand new super awesome sewing machine with buttloads of decorative stitches.  Have you ever looked at a sewing machine and gone "who actually uses all those embroidery stitches?"  It's me.  I'm the one who uses them.  I like crazy quilting.  I don't like embroidering over the seamlines by hand, though.  So I use the machine for the seamlines and then do hand (or in the future perhaps free motion) embroidery in the patches where it's fun.

So, I buy this awesome brand new machine a week before my vacation, and I bring it home, and... it doesn't zigzag properly.  So then there's a big fiasco with a snotty and insulting salesperson at the store until I finally got around her and got the owner/technical person to look at it, and he agrees the machine isn't all it ought to be.  Most people wouldn't notice, but most people don't use every single stitch their machine has to offer either, and I more or less do.  So he's going to replace it, but because of the holiday, the new machines won't be in until next week.

I do have another machine to do the straight stitching with, so I've assembled the crazy quilt piece big enough to ultimately turn into a fat quarter project bag with full lining. It's all ready to be attached to the foundation fabric with decorative stitches -- but unfortunately, the machine with the decorative stitches is not here.  (The owner did offer to let me borrow the one he'd worked on, which is now in "good enough that most people wouldn't notice but you do" territory, but I didn't really want to be schlepping a 30 lb machine back and forth.)  So that's on hold -- although on the up side, when I do get the new machine, I've got the perfect project to run it through its paces with.

OK, no worries.  A few weeks ago in a fit of passion I bought a ruffler which fits the old machine.  I was planning to use it for doll clothes. I even have fabric to make a circle skirt with tiered ruffles for Rose that I never got around to because I wasn't up to ruffling so much fabric by hand.  So I put it on my Old Trusty, and pull out the instructions from Youcanmakethis.com.

Now, typically when you're doing a not-insane ruffle, you want to original fabric to be 1.5 to 2 times longer than the finished ruffle turns out to be.  The youcanmakethis.com instructions start you with the minimum your ruffler will reliably do, and then show you how to tweak your settings upward until you get to 2.  So I get started, I find where it just starts to ruffle and DAMN.  The things goes from nothing to insane immediately.  I take the measurement, and with the minimum ruffle depth and a 2.5 stitch length, the ratio is 3.3 -- way above where I want to end up.  Making the stitch as long as the machine can handle will just get me down to a skosh over 2.0.

From past experience I know that the circle skirts with tiers look better around a 1.5 to 1.75.  When you're doing multiple tiers, that exponential growth catches up to you fast.  But now I'm out of levers to pull.  (Well, I can do a deeper pleat every 6 stitches, but that doesn't look the same as the gathered look you get with a very shallow pleat every 1 stitch).

I guess when you pay $15 for an accessory that usually starts at $40, you kind of expect this.  So, if anyone was considering the Inspira ruffler because it's too cheap to resist, warning: you're getting what you pay for.

It works OK as a pleater.  I could do some cute pleated sailor skirts if I wanted to. Or if I get really desperate, I can pull out the old Izek and use it, since it has a longer top stitch length.  I don't really want to keep the Izek around indefinitely, though.  I have a gathering foot around here somewhere, too, so maybe I'll give that a go.

This ruffler won't work on the new machine anyway, assuming the new new machine works out.  If the assumption is correct, I may see if I can get that brand's ruffler for it before Christmas, and use it over my next vacation.

If you didn't know better...

I am culling my library pretty hard and getting rid of the books that no longer delight me.  As I go through I'm realizing that if you didn't know me and you looked at my shelves, you might think that I am a quilter.

More accurately, you might look at my discard box and think I was a quilter. That would be closer to the truth, but only slightly.

I did dabble with quilting briefly in and shortly after college. I even got so far as to finish one quilt top, get it basted (using three different techniques in a vain effort to find one that didn't make me want to hang myself with a spool of quilting thread) and started tying it as I had no room for a quilting frame. The kitties thought that its presence in my wicker project basket transformed both into a marvelous cat bed, and so it has remained ever since, half the safety pins and basting still in place. Binding was right out.
I don't mind a bit, because they love it more than any human ever would. It is still the sleeping spot; Bunny's in it right now this second.

That was the closest I ever came to completing a traditional patchwork quilt project.

The truth of the matter is, I love the look of a well-executed quilt. Particularly the tessellating ones like Snail's Trail or Milky Way. Absolutely beautiful. I admire the people who make them, because they require a great deal of planning and precision, and I do not have the aptitude to do that.
Actually, I suppose I do have aptitude for planning and precision, but the 40+ hours a week I get paid for it pretty much empties the storehouse. A quilt like that isn't fun for me to make. The truth is, part of the reason I have so many quilting books is that on some level I was convinced if I just looked enough, I would find a method that would make quilt-making not painful.

Didn't work so good.

I need to find a quilter who wants some large handknits done, so we can trade. They can make me a Snail's Trail and the paper-pieced Pegasus quilt I have a pattern for, and I'll knit them a couple of sweaters. We'll each pay for the materials for the projects we're getting back, and the labor will even out. And we each get to do a hobby we love on someone else's dime, kinda.

So anyway, most of the quilting books are going. Not all, though. I do crazy quilting, and some techniques, especially applique, still work. (And some of the stuff like in Fantastic Fabric Folding I will make work, because it's just too cool not to.)