Tulip Festival Pictures

It's been a while since you heard from me. A few days ago Bob saw me working on the blog and gently suggested to me that perhaps I shouldn't do any more blog posts until I finish the skirts I started sewing for the girls back in April. My machine, however, was giving me fits, breaking the top thread every six to twelve inches of sewing. It was frustrating. I gave up for a while after fully lubricating my machine and filing all nicks and burs off the needle plate only to have the thread break again. My attempt to arrange an alternative sewing location failed because my friend was using her machine and then her machine stopped working.

Later this week I had a breakthrough. I saw exactly where the thread was catching and breaking. A damaged screw was snagging and cutting my thread. I filed the screw head so it was smoother, and Bob turned the screw a bit so the thread couldn't catch. I started sewing a line of stitches to gather one tier of the skirt and I was able to sew really fast (speeding up was when I would have trouble before). Unfortunately when I was just inches from the end of a very long run, my bobbin thread ran out. For those of you who know anything about sewing, that wasn't good. To gather something you have to have a continuous chain of stitching all the way around. At 11:00 at night I wasn't feeling up to doing any more work. I let the skirt sit for a day before tearing out the stitching.

I must confess that the skirts are still not done. They are hemmed and have nicely finished side seems, but the tiers have not been gathered or sewn together. I am setting a goal for myself to finish before I go to Des Moines on Thursday for a homeschooling conference.

I asked Bob if even though I wasn't done with the skirts I could post these Tulip Festival pictures that I had uploaded a week ago (that's the really time consuming part of bloggiing). He conceded. I really wanted to share them with you before the month was through. So, here they are.