Technical difficulties

I started the quilting by outlining the deer and tree trunks to stabilize the fabric and the batting. I always try to work around the quilt covering some broad areas very simply and then slowly work in more detailed quilting, working evenly across the quilt. The reason for that is to avoid having areas with really dense quilting that pulls the fabric in, shrinking its surface area, making big poofy open spots that are harder to quilt evenly without getting puckers or creases in the quilted fabric.

I started to outline quilt the scroll work in the sky with gold metallic thread. I put Bottom Line in the bobbin and metallic thread on top, and started quilting. I was very unhappy with the way the thread was bunching up on my starts and stops, then the thread started skipping stitches and breaking fairly often. I changed the needle to a titanium 90/14 which should handle the metallic thread even better than the standard 90/14, but the thread still shredded and broke. My Janome 6600 is very finicky when it comes to thread not matching in the bobbin and top, so that may have been the biggest problem. Since I did not want to put metallic thread in the bobbin, it was going to be a nightmare to quilt the way things were going.

I figured my best course of action at this point was going to be to switch machines. I pulled out my old Pfaff Creative 1475 (17 years young), which has always handled a variety of threads wonderfully, reacquainted myself with it, threaded it up with the gold thread and it quilted like a dream.

I have decided to stick with the Pfaff for now since it is doing so well and have moved on to regular thread again quilting the leaves on one of the trees.