Category: tools and notions

Hey there blog!  Sorry to have been neglectful and I have to admit that there has not been much blog-worthy activity, actually not a lot of activity at all in the sewing room over the last six weeks or so.  Doesn't mean I won't get there.  Life has thrown a wrench or two in the works and now it is garden season as well, so the competition for my time has been fierce.  

In the meantime, I am eagerly awaiting Katrina Rodabaugh's new book Make Thrift Mend, and while I wait I purchased a little present for myself, a mending toolkit from Katrina's Etsy shop.  I am so happy to have received it.  I feel giddy with joy, something akin to that childhood Christmas morning joy.  

The contents are perfect as well, a pair of sashiko needles, some thread, a couple of pieces of denim, ruler, marking pencil, a lovely small notebook.  I don't actually have any denim that requires mending at the moment, but I am hoping that this little bag will become my essential emergency kit to keep in the house.  I intend to add small scissors, and a few other basic all-purpose mending items for those most common small things that seem to turn up regularly, and only don't get accomplished immediately because I am too tired or lazy to go outside and up the stairs to the studio.  Yes it is true, I can be that lazy.

As for other activities, I am making a couple of baptismal banners for my church this week, and then hope to return to cataloging and eventually sewing.  Visions of summer dresses are dancing in my head.  More soon.  Not an empty promise….. or so I intend (hope). 

Look what my mom sent me:

Oodles and Oodles of my favorite Mettler thread!

Thanks Mom!

The sewing room in 2007 is a pile of UFO’s and mending — all things I have no real incentive to start except that they are hanging around my neck like a pile of bricks. All of the UFO’s are things I want to have, but the excitement with which I began has faded as interruptions have placed them further and further from memory.  If I start something new, I fear that I will be ultimately only adding more to the UFO pile and the burden of their presence will become oppressive.

So I have vowed to work through my past projects, although I may give myself little breaks; sewing  rewards I might say.  If I complete a certain number of things I can make something new.  Hopefully the successful elimation of old projects,  the addition of new items to my wardrobe, and the occasional new project will keep me going.

With all of this in mind I was ready to dive in.  I wanted to finish the Simplicity jacket first, but G ripped the lining out of his favorite pair of windpants and I naively agreed to fix them first.  As usually happens when I really want to be doing something else, the job was not as simple as I originally thought.  The windpants ripped because the lining fabric at the bottom of the leg was shredding.  The knit lining from the knee up was fine.   I found some lining in my stash that is a little heavier than the average bemberg, and although it was not white like the original lining, it was a perfect color to coordinate with the outer shell of the pants.  So I washed the bemberg and removed the old lining pieces from the pants, using them to make a pattern for the new pieces.

It was when I began to sew that the trouble began, turning what should have been a half-hour’s project into a prolonged siege:

I decided to use the Elna simply because I was too lazy to unthread the Bernina, which was still threaded for the Simplicity Jacket.  I hadn’t used the Elna since I brought it home from the shop in November so I set it up, and ran a short seam on some scrap fabric.  All looked good.  I put the lining in the machine, and started sewing.  As I moved down the seam I saw a large puddle of oil growing next to my fabric.  Then I noticed oil running down the needle.  To say that I was annoyed is putting my reaction very mildly.  There was a big oil stain on my lining fabric right at the seam line and oil  all over my machine.   Obviously the person who repaired the machine over-oiled it.  So I got out more scrap fabric and started seaming randomly.  I got nice even stitches and lovely oil lines all over my fabric.  It got better, the oil seemed to stop, I stitched faster, more oil poured out, it splattered like a spray gun on me and all around my sewing table.  This was not fun!  Eventually however the oil supply seemed to have been exhausted and I was able to sew, half an hour later.

I began stitching the lining to the wind pants.  The machine jammed.  I fixed it and started again.  About a foot of seam later the machine jammed again, the thread popped out of the upper tension device and made a big tangle.  I had trouble resetting the tension.  This was the same problem for which I had originally taken the machine in for repair.  Three more times I dismantled the machine, cleaned it out, reassembled it, and started over. 

Eventually I had to give up.  I unthreaded the Bernina, transferred the bobbin thread from the Elna bobbin to the Bernina bobbin, and finished the job.  The pants look beautiful.  G is probably the only man at the gym whose wind pants are lined with Ermengilda Zegna lining fabric.

I wonder if anything had been done to my machine or if the shop
had simply poured oil in it and charged me $50 for the privelege.
Admittedly I had had second thoughts.  When I took the machine in, at
the recommendation of the  closed Elna dealer who used to repair my
machine, the repair person said they didn’t sell or usually work with
Elna’s and they were just taking them as a favor.  She did not sound
encouraging.  Naively, I gave her my machine anyway.  Now I regret
having done so.

The top piece of the upper tension device on the Elna definitely looks broken.  I went to the Elna website and found that the closest dealers are all in NYC since my local dealer closed last summer.  Crown Machine on upper Broadway still sells and services Elnas.  I used to take my machine there before I had a local dealer.   I see an excuse for a trip into NYC in my future.

G tells me it is silly to go in to NYC just to take a machine to the shop, we should go earlier on a day we have a concert and drop it off.  (I will still have to go back and pick it up eventually).  If I go in by myself I see this as an opportunity to get into all kinds of trouble in NYC.  Besides, Crown machine used to fix the machine the same day, I could drop it, wander around, and come back at the end of the day to take it home with me.  It could take longer if they needed to order more obscure parts, but most of the time it was a one day job.  I wonder if they still do that.  It seems worth a try.  A day of fun and getting to take my baby home the same day sounds soo much better than dropping it off late in the afternoon and having to go back to pick it up another day. I know G will never go in early in the morning on a concert day, just to drop off a machine; he probably also thinks I can wait a month and pick it up the next time we go to a concert.  Ha!

I had hoped last night to finish serging the edges of the black and white jacket but I got distracted by an e-mail which led to some research and discussion of the Fiat plant which opened in Poughkeepsie in 1910.  That discussion pretty much used up my sewing time, and G was ready for bed, but I begged a little extra time to do my serging.

I shouldn’t have bothered.  The serger jammed up again after a few inches.  This seems to have been the norm with this project so I shut everything down and decided that the serger and I needed to spend some quality time together this afternoon.

I had a sneaking suspicion I knew the nature of the problems, and after I managed to fix it the first time, I spent some extra time playing with the machine.  Yes my suspicions were correct.  It was a thread problem.

I know people whose sergers don’t care what thread goes into them, but me, I’m familiar with thread problems.  My first serger was a lovely machine, I could thread it mid-seam and we constructed a lot of garments together.  But it was very particular about thread.  It only liked Mettler.  Anything else and it jammed.  So I always bought Mettler thread, and I gave away everything else.  Then I discovered Mettler’s finer serger thread, Metrolene, and I loved it.  It gave the finest finished edges, even on sheer fabrics.    But Mettler stopped making Metrolene,  I bought a big supply at that time, and most of it is gone, except for six colors. 

I guess I hadn’t used any of the Metrolene on the new serger, which I have now had a year or a little better.  But I used it on this job.  It was the only kind of white serger thread I had in stock; I guess I haven’t sewn anythng white and I am fairly picky about matching my serger thread to my project.

Anyway, the thread kept popping out of its guides as I was serging, and the Metrolene is so fine I have trouble seeing it, especially the white threads.  As soon as I ran regular serger thread through the machine everything worked perfectly; if I switched out one thread, it started acting up and I couldn’t get it readjusted to work. This serger doesn’t seem to care about the quality or brand of the thread itself, I even tested it with Maxi-Loc which just stopped my older serger cold, It handles fuzzy nylon and various embroidery and specialty threads, but it doesn’t seem to like the really fine thread, at least not the Metrolene.  But then, perhaps it is just me.

So the remainder of my Metrolene collection is going bye-bye:

Mettler Metrolene thread 2000 m spools
color 792     navy — 4 spools
color 003     black  — 5 spools
color 739     red — 4 spools
color 632     gray — 4 spools
color 692 l    ight beige — 4 spools
color 619     brown  bronze —  4 spools

If anybody reading this wants any of the thread, leave a comment; it just needs a good home.  If not I will put it up on e-bay after Thanksgiving.