Fingers crossed...it is working again

I'm not exactly sure how, but the quilting machine seems to be working again. I had it in the repair shop twice and after the first time it was working worse than before. The guy at the shop said there were only three things they could adjust. The timing, the needle height and the distance the bobbin is away from the motor. He adjusted the timing so knew that was right and moved the needle up all the way. He said it was down really far. When I took it back he put it back to where it was before. But the second time I brought it home, it was still skipping stitches and breaking almost as much as before I took it in the first time. I can't tell you how frustrating that is.

I took the needle plate out and sanded the hole again. After playing with it for about an hour, I found out that the thread broke when I moved the machine away from me to the left every time, especially when I moved in a diagonal straight line. So I figured it had to have a burr on the needle plate somewhere. But, that didn't seem to fix the trouble. So, I sanded the path of the thread using the finest sandpaper they sell for sanding cars. That didn't seem to help.

I kept sewing and breaking thread and sewing and breaking and then it just stopped breaking. Don't ask me why. My husband says maybe the machine just needed to warm up. It took 6 quilts to warm up?
Well, I'm not going to question it, but I am going to keep watching and checking to see if there are troubles again. It sure does feel good to be able to put a quilt on and pull it off 15 minutes later instead of 2 hours later and 43 thread breaks later!

I have so many quilt tops waiting to be quilted and out of here into the hands of kids who need them. I have plans for this summer and now that things seem to be working again, I can get busy.

My little guy's last day of kindergarten is tomorrow. Hooray. Summer vacation is almost here! My days are pretty busy today and tomorrow, but after that things should pick up in the sewing room.

Here are the quilts I've been working on while trying to fix the machine. I hope to be posting more now that things are working better.

More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
—Romans 5:3-5

I did a little rejoicing in my suffering these past couple of weeks :)