Sewing machines : a love story

Before I get going this morning I want to thank you for your comments on nightwear. I can feel a theme warming up here. It's what you wear for yourself, when no one is looking, that really counts, shows your self-care or respect or whatever you want to call it. I think all women need to pay attention to that.


Now moving on to my love story.


The relationship of a sewer to her machine is a profound one. Machines have distinct personalities. You know this is true. Some just seem like arranged marriages and some, well you are just close. Finding a machine that you can feel like this about takes a lot of work.


I have seen sewers spend thousands and thousands on a new machine and pull out the old unit because they feel more comfortable with it. I have a number of machines, including a Pfaff 7570 with dual feed, and my daughter still prefers to sew on the $20 Elna that came from a church rummage sale. 


She says it feels more comfortable to work with.


I have sewing machine opinions. 


Once, about 20 years ago, I did some part-time educator work for Pfaff, then also Viking/Husqvarna then Singer when all those corporate relationships kept changing. I made friends with the Pfaff technician who had trained in the factory in Germany. He was really funny and sometimes he even let me assist him at technical training sessions for dealers. I was pretty incompetent at that but I learned a few things.


I will probably share some of that over the next few days. In the meantime want to share my pictures of my Bernina 801 which, due to the randomness of eBay, now has an original extension table.


My tech friend told me once that the older Berninas had a wonderful hook and a stitch and I have always wanted to try it. I think I know enough to look inside a machine and see if it is bashed up, and I was happy with this one, which, once I had assembled all missing parts costs, about $360 all up. Far less than you will pay for these machines or similar.


Last night I fired her up and got to work on a shirt I wanted to make due to my current interest in making more for my ordinary life.

Here I am on the tiny table we have in this house. Nice machine extension table isn't it? Arrived yesterday.

The collar stitches. The machine went through this like butter and I was beside myself. Definitely the best stitch quality I have ever seen. 

I think I am going to do a Q and A on machines over the next day or two. 

Any questions you have? This is one of my favourite topics.

Shirts and Scarlett

Miss Scarlett and I were on our own this weekend with her parents away at a wedding and my better half still in the land of the midnight sun (but back the end of the week).


This morning I am considering my sewing life and drinking a quiet coffee after an action packed few days.

Here she is in a toy stroller with Pinky Bear. It turns out it was Pinky's weekend to get toilet trained so he spent a far amount of time being fished out of the toilet, washed and then blow dried. He is making some progress but apparently not enough. Day two we had to put him back in diapers. (By the way those are pen marks on her arm - we move fast when Babs is on the phone.)


Miss Scarlett really is our girl and a bit of a conversationalist. When I went to get her up after a nap on Saturday she took one look at me and said "Nice dress Babs, did you make it yourself?" This kid and I will have a lot to talk about.


I spent my evenings doing semi-horizontal knitting and nap times making shirts.


I have two going for the on his way to NYC son. I made him one a year ago and his comment was that the collar was weird and so I have delayed trying another one while I thought about that.


We talked about it last visit and it turns out he was sort of waiting for more shirts and that I had "nailed the fit" and really all the collar needed was a tiny bit shaved off and a place for collar stays.


Being female I don't have a lot of collar stay experience but can see now that they are a good idea. Hold the points up but don't require crazy heavy interfacing.


Gigi has a great tutorial on a really easy collar stay method that doesn't use buttonholes and I did that and am super pleased with the results:

This is what the underside of the collar looks like with the collar stay patch on it - I am making a striped and a plain blue shirt but thought the striped showed best how the grain goes.


Of course I didn't get the stripes matched - the collar has shape and the stay is folded on grain - not that I tried very hard, since this is on the underside.


I also revived a memory of how to do the shirt pocket hem:


1. Fold the top hem allowance to the inside.
2. Fold it down again.
3. Stitch through all layers along the fold 1/4."
4. From the right side press the fold down.

Now I know this shirt fits I am very much enjoying the zen of this sewing project. The details are so precise and clean and classic. The cotton presses so nicely. 


Men's sewing is so different. All the fit fussing just isn't there. This makes me think for the upteempth time that male dress, collar stand shirts, blazer type jackets and pants with flys, are really not natural garments on the female body and a lot of work to get to fit. Tell me what is less stress to sew? A dress or a fitted jacket?


While I was sewing these shirts I was reminded of how much I enjoy sewing machines. That straight stitch plate makes all the difference to being able to top stitch around collars without losing a stitch or packing them up at the corners.


Quite a few years ago I did some part-time work for some sewing machine companies as an educator. It was a bit of an indulgence and something I gave up when work got really busy. It was so much fun though. One of the best things I did was was when one of the companies send me their complete line and I wrote sort of demo guides for them comparing and emphasizing features.


Can you imagine how great it was to have all those machines to test and play with? I am a bit wistful about that. I would love to have machines to review - there are so many new features out there and cruising the net over the weekend I wondered to myself how would anyone ever figure out what suited them? It's all pretty overwhelming.


I wonder if I contacted a few of the companies what would happen?

The more things change the more they stay the same

At the beginning of the week I took my sewing machine, a Pfaff 7570, into the shop. They told me it would be two weeks before I had it back.


Two weeks! The stress of it. Now I have back-up machine. A little Janome, but I have set up with my Singer buttonholer and it does a superlative job making nice little round ended buttonholes, just the way I like them. Perfect every time and no need to rip out and restitch, ever. I didn't want to mess with that.

BTW if you want to know why there is tape on the bed of the machine in this picture I have replaced the Janome feed dog cover (you have to drop or cover the feed dogs with this attachment) with a piece of clear plastic I cut out of some packaging, with a hole in it for the needle to go through and taped it to the machine. I find the attachment moves easier this way.


So not wanting to interfere with something I had set up just right, I decided to look for a second hand simple machine to do simple sewing when my main machine was down.


And I found this, for about the same amount of money I paid 
 for my straight stitch plate:

A beautiful old Pfaff that does such a gorgeous straight stitch. When I looked at those stitches I almost cried. So beautiful where those stitches and so nice the purr of this machine in fact that I stayed up last night and took out all my topstitching in my HP blouse and redid it on this machine.


Call me crazy and you would be right.


All this reminded me that despite all the fancy machines now on the market not a lot has changed. 


A good stitch is still a good stitch.


Let me tell you a story.


A while ago a friend of mine picked up an old wooded file cabinet at an estate sale. In it he found a pile of original patent documents, including some for sewing machines. They are dated just before WWI.


He was going to throw them out but at the last minute had the good sense to remember me and gave me them to me.


Five of them are now framed and hang over my fireplace.


Here is a picture of one of the patents here. You will see that the design of the sewing machine, how the stitch is formed, hasn't really changed at all. 

 Now off for a weekend of dog walking, paper marking and shirt sewing. More on that later.

Do you love your sewing machine?

I love sewing machines. There are few things as interesting to me as a new machine to discover, fresh out of the box.

And I have known quite a few. I have in my time done some educational work with Pfaff, Husquvarna/Viking, Singer and have reviewed some Brother machines. Good ones, in all those lines. And no I have not ever sewn on a Bernina.

The truth is that the sewing machine business has changed over the years. RIght now many machines are made in the same factories in the East in what they call Original Equipment Manufactures. Brand loyalty in fact may not be what it was and in fact different machines may now come out of the same factory. I am sure you have noticed almost identical machines with different brand names. That said different companies have different specs and some companies still manufacture their own top of the lines to very specific specifications and in their own factories, although parts may come from many sources.

Right now I sew on a Pfaff 7570 which I love, but not completely. If I had my way my dream machine would include:

• a fantastic buttonhole. I have issues with machines that are now priced the same as a small car but do not produce a wonderful buttonhole. My 7570 makes a decent buttonhole but the sides are too close together, no way of adjusting this, and it is too easy to cut the stitches open when you cut the buttonhole. It is a real pain to have a nice buttonhole with the zig zag stitches sliced open and frayed. To handle this I make a version of a manual buttonhole with an elaborate series of steps, following something I read in Threads years ago. Also unless the buttonhole sides are stitched in the same direction they will not, cannot, look the same. I have found the old automatic buttonhole where you put the button in the back of the buttonhole foot often makes better buttonholes than my 7570 although there can be thickness issues here. You know you can keep increasing the embroidery area all you want but until I get a buttonhole I can rely on I am not that impressed. I make a lot more buttonholes than embroidered vests and tablecloths, in fact I make none of those.
• good utility stitches. I like the serpentine stitch, where has that gone?
• a thread cutter.
• a needle threader.
• really good built in lighting. Old machines had this and it was great.

What do you like in a machine?