Saturday, July 20, 2019

Randomday with Catastrophe

 First the good news. Celtic Solstice has been finished for about two weeks, and is going to live with my brother in Virginia. I haven't been finishing quilt tops very fast for several years, and I would like to do better at supplying my family and friends with quilts. So this one's for Andy.
 She looks so innocent, Muffball does. But no!
This is the brain of the stitch regulator that was attached to my Megaquilter setup. I took the machine off the carriage so I could replace some worn carriage plastic tracks, as I blogged about after finishing Celtic Solstice. I was very optimistic that I could whip out those six quilt tops that need quilting. But I dawdled a bit with re-lifting the machine onto the refurbished carriage. And yesterday when I came home, I realized the entire carriage had been toppled over off the tracks, and the framework of the apparatus that goes around the heavy machine had fallen sideways onto the far end of the frame. This caused the wires leading into the red box to wrench out, and broke at least two of the black components on the circuitboard. It's a $500 piece of high-tech equipment that I can't possibly fix and can't really justify replacing right now. So now, instead of looking forward to zipping out lots of quilts, I'm going to have to try quilting with no real control of stitch length and speed. I used to do machine quilting on my little machine, not the frame, without a stitch regulator. But... grr. I can't even figure out how to dis-assemble the stitch regulator and replace it with the speed control switch that came with the frame, or whether that will even work. It unquestionably deflates my happiness in being able to solve the (relatively inexpensive) problem of wobbly tracks. Technology and I do not get along.

It was almost certainly the cat. Wish I could have been home to see her terrified reaction to jumping on the carriage... but only if I had hidden the stitch regulator first!

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