Learning the hard way

"Careful. We don't want to learn from this!"

I should heed this advice from Calvin and Hobbs. Unfortunately, I've been learning a lot lately.

Last week I loaded a customer quilt at the shop and started quilting. It wasn't until several passes later when I advanced the quilt that I discovered this: eyelashes.

Eyelashes are great for a night on the town. Not so much on the back of a quilt. Eyelashes mean tension issues. Ugly. So then I had to do this: frog.

Frogs are cute in the garden. But for machine quilters, it just means spending some extra quality time with your seam ripper. Rip it! Rip it! Rip it!

Smooth sailing after that.

I hate when I have to learn things the hard way! But now I check my tension and check it often.