first there is the gorgeous old black singer that i finally tested out this past winter. it is a lovely machine with a pleasing hum, but once the single bobbin i have that fits it ran out of thread, i could not get it to wind for the life of me. sometimes hang ups like this will take me an absurdly long time to resolve. and then there is this beautiful touch & sew with the aqua panel. i think i'm in love with the aqua panel more than anything. the machine turns on, i know that. but there are a few pieces missing that i need to scour my non-functioning touch & sews for. yes, i do have a small collection of non functioning touch & sews.
and then there is this new beastie, a singer touch-tronic 2010. i jumped on it (and all the others) because my now ten-year-old most basic singer is ailing. she can't keep her tension. she smells like burnt rubber. and she has her limitations when it comes to stitch options. i would like to pass her on to tashi, and step it up a little. as a rude-ish sewing machine saleswoman said to me once, your sewing won't grow if you don't get a more advanced machine! well. her commission won't grow either, unless she sells a few.
anyway, i do pay attention when machines pop up on freecycle because a new fancy machine is just not in the budget. and oh how i would love something from here. but for now, i just have to grow with my growing collection of used machines! the touch tronic came with four (yes, i said, four) other sewing machines. i didn't want the whole lot, but the woman getting rid of them wanted one person to take the whole lot, so, that i did. two of the machines are incredibly old and gorgeous. the others are touch & sews. none of them work, that is, unless they are worked on.
so they are sitting on some shelves while i ponder the situation and try to learn the ins and outs of this new touch-tronic. except, you see, the bobbin jams on the touch-tronic. it jams. and then it's fine for a bit. and then it jams again. so yea, i probably have to take it to get serviced. something that is also not even in the budget.
so anyway, i'm trying to get little bits of sewing in, between bobbin jams, while it's 100 degrees outside. i made some shorts for tristan from the instructions on how to make trousers from a shirt, in amanda's soule's, the creative family. i used a garnet hill shirt of tashi's, now too small. i hope to make several more pairs of shorts for both tristan and tashi.
and another bib of course. it was my first test run on the new machine. the fabric is totally goofy and from a stash of fabric i also got through freecycle! tristan is really into toads lately because we have two living under the house. the bib makes him giggle.
i do have a fondness for my first machine, the one i learned to sew on, the one i am still learning to sew on. but i would love to see it in tashi's room, and i would love to see her sitting at it making creations whenever the whim hits her, a good twenty years before i ever sewed creations of my own.
2 comments:
I love your old machines! They're so pretty!
Sometimes I wonder about sewing machine salespeople. I went to the store to get needles for the serger I bought off craigslist. It's my 1st serger ever, found it for $75, a Kenmore, good to play with until I figure out what I'm doing with it.
Saleslady hears that and goes "oh you shouldn't have done that! for the price you paid for that one plus 100 you could have bought a new singer... and then when you got practiced, you could have traded up to a big girl machine."
She actually said that. *headdesk*
Your 1st Singer looks almost identical to mine, still going strong.
love all your sewing machines! good luck on your sewing adventures!
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