Earlier I decided to take a break from editing the second edition of my Family Law Key Facts book and sneak down to quilt. (Becuase (a) the editing is tedious in the extreme although the fee is not bad and pays fro all my fabric buying (b) the quilting is always tempting and (c) I have embarked on a project to finish several more traditional quilts I started when I first began quilting at the beginning of the year and now have lingering in various stages of near completion so I can start a clean start with some more exciting ones).

I had just finished my first machine applique and was thinking how nicely my Memrory Craft machine stitched when it jammed. The thread kept getting caught around the bobbin race. Panic! The race looks like this:
I could see that the spring under that slilver hammer thing had come loose and a tiny piece of wire was sticking out. After half an hour of fiddling with my seam unripper i did get it back in place but as soon as I sewed with it it came out again. Grrrr! I was trying to come to terms with the grief (in the sense both of inconvenience and a deep sense of loss) of having to package the machine up and send it away under the guarantee for days on end when I found a very nice engineer who turend out to be in the locality and came to rescue me. But in trying to fix the clip he managed to break it completely!

As it turns out it works perfectly well with the clip completely removed and we are not sure that it serves any function other than to regulate the length of the tail left after cutting the thread with the integral cutter. Panic over and I was able to go back to my first commission.... a fleeced back piece out of scraps my cleaner saw lying around for her dog to sleep on! Still, I suppose its all good practice.