Don’t worry, friends, I am okay.
I ended up in the ER last week, though.
Nothing’s wrong with me. Physically, anyway. My paranoia led me to wait for nearly six hours for a doctor to say I was healthy. It started with sharp chest pains–something I’d never experienced before–shortly after punching in at work. For three hours, I tried convincing myself that it was probably nothing. The longer it persisted, the less certain I felt about the state of my heart.
Hi-ho, hi-ho, off to the ER I go!
Of course, I’m relieved nothing was wrong with my heart. Yet I feel foolish for clogging up the ER queue for a nothingburger.
My midlife crisis activity is what’s kept me from writing, reading, playing on the Switch, and–to a lesser effect–getting on the trainer. I had 780 squares of fabric to sew together. I knew it’d be a lot of work, but I convinced myself it’d be possible to keep up with the rest of the class. After all, I have three-day weekends.
But I immediately hit a snag. The feed dog no longer worked. The feed dog is the spiky plate that pokes through the bottom of the sewing machine. When it works correctly, it moves in an elliptical motion and pulls the fabric forward. Instead of doing that, my feed dog was groundhogging it. The up and down motion is useless.
I bust out the isopropyl alcohol and sewing machine oil and channeled my inner Bill Murray. While I got the feed dog going again, I was unable to attain its full range of motion. Oh well. Tiny stitches are better than no stitches.
At the end of the day one of my three-day quilting marathon, I ran out of white thread. Day Two began with a mission to get more thread. I also had to rip apart two rows that were reversed. The tiny stitches I was forced to use made this already-tedious task infinitely less enjoyable. I got the most done on the third day, as I’d become a master at sewing the scant 1/4″ seam allowance that’s standard in quilting.
So, I have all my rows in a row. Next, I need to press the seams open and sew the rows together.
I’m not even close to finishing this quilt, which, if my math is correct, will have a finished size of 36″ x 45″. It’s a quilt for ants.
Here’s a sneak peek:
squaremeat.com 