Other posts on this project: My Next Quilting Project, Circle Quilt Pt. 1, Circle Quilt Pt. 2, Circle Quilt Pt. 3.

I must have done something in a former life to really tick off circles because this project is turning out to be quite the beast.

I managed to figure out how to glue the circles together, that was messy but fine. When it came time to actually sew the circles in I discovered that I didn’t have the needed zipper foot to do it. Turns out it’s not that easy to just buy a zipper foot. I called a bunch of stores and went to a few more with no luck. Then I found an online site that sold the feet dirt cheap. The only problem was figuring out which Janome zipper foot actually fits my low shank machine (I had to learn how to figure out low from high shank, too). Janome makes about 5 different zipper feet, and (helpfully) none of the feet on their site matched the part numbers of the ones I found online. This was not from an authorized Janome dealer, which I’m sure was the problem. I went ahead and ordered 3 different ones (hey, they were about $2 each) and waited almost a week to get them. When they arrived, I had one invisible zipper foot (saving that for another project) and 2 seemingly identical Janome zipper feet. I opened one and tried it out: it was for a high-shank machine, so the screw hole didn’t line up. I called 1 Janome dealer who told me he could order the foot, but he wasn’t putting in a Janome order for quite a while. The 2nd dealer assured me had the foot and would sell it to me for $25; when I asked him for the part number to try and be sure it wasn’t what I’d already bought (I’d be driving an hour to his store, after all), he refused to tell me, got nasty, and hung up. The third Janome dealer had the foot, walked me through putting it on my machine, and matched up the part number of the foot I’d bought that was still in the box; he said that was correct. Still convinced it was wrong, I was getting ready to drive the hour to that 3rd store. I decided to open the last box and see.

Turns out it was a low-shank foot all along, but the high and low look almost identical. One just has the screw in a different place. So after all that, the $2 foot worked.

So tonight I sat down to FINALLY sew this thing together so I could move on to a new project, spent an hour learning to use the zipper foot (the first photo shows a successful circle all done), and I accidentally cut a hole into it with my pinking shears (see right).

I’m not sure whether to laugh, cry, or throw it in the compost heap. I just want to finish and move on to holiday projects!