A Broken Foot

No, no, don't worry, it's not one of my feet. They are fine.
But I broke the quilting foot on my sewing machine. To be more precise, the bit of wire on top that causes the foot to hop up and down while quilting simply snapped.

Of course it happened in the middle of me quilting. Darn!
Then I remember reading somewhere that somebody recommended to break a foot on purpose then wrapping some rubber band around the top to put some pressure on the spring and then use the foot not as a hopping but as a sliding foot. As I couldn't get a foot fitting my machine on short notice anyway, I decided to give it a try.

It actually works pretty good. Nice about this is that the movement is not quite a jerky as with the hopping foot, and also that you can leave the tension of the upper thread at the normal machine setting (normally I have a setting of 4.6, which I need to reduce to around 3 for quilting).
Disadvantage is that if there's a bump in your quilt, you tend to get a bit of a snag there, and also that figuring out the perfect number of coils for the rubber band is a bit tricky.

The swirly waves are done with the intact foot, and the stippling is done with the modified foot. Looks good.
Anyway, I finished the quilting more or less without further problems and am in the middle of sewing the binding on.