Sewing Machine!

On Mother's Day, I picked up some knitting that has gone unfinished for two years now. While trying to remember my knits and purls, I pulled up some episodes on HGTV.com. Under this barrage of domesticity, it entered my head that I should get a sewing machine.

This stray thought was bizarre, given my history with sewing machines. When I was a teenager, I tried to make a single quilting square. It took an entire day and only made it halfway finished. Then a few years ago, I tried to give it another shot on a borrowed Singer. That ended in a nightmare of tangled thread and stitches a fraction as orderly as the foot paths on a Family Circus comic.


Yup. That approximates the behavior of both my hemlines and Luna at 6 a.m.


Do not be fooled by the facade of lazy incompetence.

Anyway, I opened the website for Joann's Fabrics despite my dark history with automated needles. And you know what I discovered? A) The world has gone insane, because the first thing that pops up when you search for a sewing machine are crazy computerized things with friggin' Smart Phones built into the side, and B) the horrifying results of my previous attempts were not my fault! The reviews for the simple Singer models complained of the same headaches I'd experienced trying to get that borrowed machine to work for me. So I wasn't hopeless; the machine was a cheap hunk of fussy plastic. The consensus online was to stay away from Singers. Not knowing anything about sewing machine brands, where did that leave me?

Just then, my mother called for her Mother's Day Chat. My mother just so happens to be a veteran sewer. She recommended a Kemore...the same brand as the washing machine Sweetie and I bought last winter and couldn't be happier with. Plus, there were a couple available down the road at the local Sears on sale for almost $50 less than the prices online.


Da-dun! So many fancy options....


With a thick book-sized manual explaining how to do them.




So pretty! You know what else is pretty? Me, in this dress I could finally finish.


Two years ago, this went into the closet with the edges unfinished, the seams barely holding together, and random strings falling out of the skirt. Within hours, thanks to a fully functional machine, it was structurally sound and all trimmed up!


I could even put that little black sash on straight. Initially, I just let the crooked waist hang out there, with bunches making me look 6 months pregnant. But with the sash to mask it, I think I look downright svelte, even at the worst of hip-emphasizing camera angles.



The one downside to the sash was that it would cut straight across the side zipper. I worked around that by stopping the sash short, then embroidering a little flower patch to Velcro on after zipping up.


I did this by hand, since I don't have the control to pull off movements that careful on the machine just yet. Plus, when I tried this morning, I wasted a lot of thread because I didn't know that even if you don't have a foot attached, you still need to put the foot presser down for the tension discs to catch the upper thread. (Don't I sound all technical now? This is thanks to spending the morning wasting an entire spool of green thread. Hence, the bare-bones leaves next to my daisy).

Now I'm thinking up more things to do with my fancy machine. I'm thinking of making a new summer robe, since the one I brought from Temecula five years ago is practically falling apart. I might also embroider some hand towels, since I've bleached them all to high heaven with benzoyl peroxide anyway. But first, that knitting project never did get done....