Spring pants for Dorian, or My sewing machine is a racist

Amanda and I packed the younger boys in the minivan yesterday and headed over to Keene to do a little fabric shopping. I wanted to make the boys new spring/summer pants like last year's which you can see here, here, here and here.

Dorian was coming with me, so he would have the whole store to choose from, but Sebastian had to give me a few choices of designs to look for. He wanted "gears, robots, rockets, or anything outer space." Bad news for him, because I kid you not, there were absolutely no robots or rockets to be found. There weren't even babyish prints or garish ones I refused to buy. There were none. There was one outer space print of some planets, but they were so large that it would not have looked good. I almost made an executive decision and got a music print, but he is getting older and pickier, so I opted to just not get him anything. Dorian was more successful and picked out the monkey combo you see above as well as a swirly blue design I haven't started on yet.

I had high hopes for getting these done quickly, seeing as I had made 4 pair of the exact same pattern last year. Not to mention things had been going exceedingly well for me with the sewing machine recently. We have had nary a fight while making the picnic quilt, the machine and I. No bobbin mishaps, no weird snarls, no thread snapping on its part, and therefore no cussing, crying, kicking or threatening on my part.

These pants were a 3 hour nightmare that involved multiple reloadings of the bobbin, seam ripping, snarling, breaking thread, and excessive frustration for me. And here's my theory: my machine is a racist. Yeah, that's right. See, the quilt is constructed with white thread and I was using brown thread for the pants. Plain as day, that sewing machine is trying to keep brown down.

We'll find out if it's pro-military when I use the navy blue thread for the next pair.