Pressure & Tension

One of the things I really like about making the coiled bowls is how different the fabric looks once it is wrapped and sewn.  The print ends up looking completely different..  Here is a good example.  I have had this wonderful tropical print for years.  I also had a small amount of this red batik let over from a batik tote bag project.  These two fabric looked really good together so why not make a basket?. One thing I notices once I started wrapping the fabric was that the mottled background of the blue print showed up more, NICE!  The other thing that my DF Margaret, who has been making this coiled baskets for a while told me is that batiks work well in them...I proved her right with this one.  BUT, it took me over 4 hours to make this puppy!.  While I was sewing this basket I because aware of all the tensions in my body since I am learning to do something rather foreign and different.  After a couple of hours of wrapping and sewing, I had a sever pain in my neck and a very sore back, YIKES, too much tension.  The other thing I noticed is that the inside on the basket looked pretty good, nice clean zig zag but the outside of the basket was a mess.   WHAT GIVES!  Since one has to sew through  a 1/2" of rope plus the fabric that is wrapped around the rope, I had loosed the tension on my machine from 4.5 to around 3. Who would right.  I checked to make sure the machine was threaded properly and in good working order and did a test on a piece of scrap and the  back of the fabric looked fine.  Only thing left to do is to play with the tension.  Once I set the tension back up to "normal" the problem disappeared.  Only problem, I had a rip out a several row of the rope I had sewn together it looked so bad.  So, I keep reminding myself that there is always a learning curve when teaching oneself something new and I am NOT going to master this overnight!  I did spend the week making several baskets & bowl (now with the proper tension at least in the sewing machine) and coasters and they are looking much better...YEAH.I liked the look of this basket enough to want to make machining coasters but didn't have enough of the red batik left  so multi colored coasters were in order.  The trick here is to adjust the tension in my neck in shoulders so that I don't end up feeling like a twisted pretzel by the end of a sewing session.