Bent Needles

I have two bent needles. One is the needle I baste with and the other I discovered this morning. I decided to recreate a needle holder I had made when I got a thread book I had bought. I would tell you the name, but it seems that my room ate the book - figures. Now that I decided to clean it up yesterday, the book went into hiding and is nowhere to be found.

The second needle I discovered this morning as I was making the needle holder. Such a nasty sound came out of my little sewing machine! I immediately stopped sewing and took out the bobin. No, nothing there. Took out the race - it looked fine, so I cleaned it and put it back. Started to make the machine go very slowly by hand to see what was up. EEEWWWW! The needle was hitting the race. I took the race out again,  put it in, took it out and repeated the whole dry run several times.
I finally pronounced that the machine needed fixing. I took out the race again - lifted the machine and looked into the hole where the race goes and saw NOTHING and decided that the calibration? was off and needed to go to the shop.
Feeling defeated, I went away and pouted a bit. Came back and thought that maybe I should try another needle. Was this a light bulb moment? No, more like a conk on the head. Put the new needle in and guess what? It worked perfectly :) I was up and running again.

So it took me a hour to actually make this silly little thing and it is not perfect, but the old one was SO UGLY I couldn't stand it anymore. And here it is - voila!

Oh, I just found that little sneaky book! It is called Thread Work Unraveled by Sarah Ann Smith