GWTW: the 1 yard line

I was 16 hours and 44 minutes into quilting Gone With The Wind. 

[Aside: How do I know it was exactly that much time?  Well, I recently bought a nifty counter to keep track of the time I spend on projects.  This nifty timer is a "count-up" time, i.e. it counts elapsed time.  It's from CDN and is their Multi-Task Timer and Clock  Now I no longer need to keep a notebook of start and stop times ... I only need to remember to *start the timer* when I start quilting.   ::sigh:: That one little action is proving to be Very Difficult.  :-(  ]

There I was .. on the 1 yard line.  I had exactly ONE border of feathers do to and the quilt would be DONE.   I was about 2/3rds the way down the first pass of the feathers.    I could taste the accomplishment of being able to take the quilt off the frame.   ::feet doing an anticipatory Happy Dance::

I'd been having some trouble with the thread shredding at times so when I discovered that I had no top thread ... *again* ... I was annoyed but resigned.  I looked up at the threading path to grab the shredded thread ... and .. it wasn't there.  What?  I looked again.  There was NO top thread.  What?

Ever have a difficult time believing what your eyes are telling you?  That was me.  What do you MEAN there's no top thread??

Eventually, it occurred to me to look at the spool of thread.  Oh.  It was empty.

Dang, dang, dang.   ::stamp feet in utter annoyance::

Now, I need to WAIT until tomorrow to get another spool of thread from my LQS because, of course, I don't have an extra one.

aarrrgghhhhh.

 
The first photo above shows a shaded blue area with a yellow arrow at the end of the shaded part.  The blue shaded area is the part of the feather border that I had completed.  The yellow arrow shows where I ran out of top thread.

The yellow arrow in the picture to the left shows the same spot as above, but you can see some of the feather border that has been quilted.























And in the picture to the right, you can see the same yellow arrow pointing the same spot where the top thread ran out.

I had just THAT much left on the concave part of the spine to do to complete the first pass of the feather.  THAT MUCH.

Then, of course, I had the other side of the spine to do.

I suppose it would have been worse had the thread run out when I was THAT MUCH away from completing the second pass.  :-)  



[Addendum: you know what's really annoying about Blogspot?  No?  Well, I'll tell you.  Apparently there is NO WAY to absolutely format your post.  When I'm composing the entry, all the graphics look reasonably well place.  When I preview it,  I see there is lots of white space.  I means LOTS  of white space.  And I can't get rid of it.  Boy, that's annoying.

Yes, I know .. a First World Problem, huh?  Still .. annoying.  harumph.]