A Time and a Season

With the craft fair behind us and the holidays not quite upon us (yeah, I'm in denial) I've been catching up on so many things around the house. Another sewing machine came in from the garage, all of the machines are now photographed and posted on Craigslist, and I've even spent a little bit of time repairing a few. and then I've had some phone calls asking for repairs.

A coworker had me repair her sewing machine this summer and in the process sold me her serger. She has since then referred a friend of hers and we met up a couple weeks ago to take her Elna SU 62 home for repairs. What a smooth running sewing machine! Although all Elna's are smooth, some can sound like a low growl is being emitted. It just needed some deep cleaning for major lint removal along with TR3 car wax for a really good cleaning. I did find the needle position dial was not moving at all so over many days I worked at loosening it up, removing dried -on oil that kept the dial from functioning. It finally worked consistently so I deemed it healed of its malady. There was also a rogue class 15 bobbin in with the Elna bobbins that I replaced with another Elna bobbin. That's one thing you don't want to fool around with: wrong bobbins can make a mess of your machine and you don't know why.

Elna SU62: dial on left was stuck

Dawn dropped off a Featherweight sewing machine that she claimed she messed up the tension. Feeling especially guilty since it wasn't her own sewing machine, she asked if I could fix it. Upon opening it up I could see that it wasn't stitching at all so checked the needle to find it was in backwards. Well, that will mess things up, for sure. I checked the tension mechanism and couldn't really find anything wrong so I checked it against another Singer 221 and it seemed to be fine. It still wouldn't stitch so I went to take the bobbin out to find a common problem: when put back together, the bobbin "finger" needs to be positioned between two little ramps on the underside of the needle plate. This one was spinning around so I only needed to take the needle plate off, position the finger between the metal ramps (for lack of a better word) and screw the needle plate back down. It stitched perfectly. When Dawn came to pick it up and I told her about the two problems. She said she hadn't done anything with either the needle or the needle plate. Hopefully that made her feel better, not having messed up her daughter's machine after all!

Singer 221 bobbin case: red arrow shows where the finger needs to rest

The heart pot holders might not have been a hit at the craft fair, but my mom sure loved them and ordered four so now I'm getting them together. I already had the fabric cut into long strips and sewn together and needed to cut them crossways into strips to give the checkboard effect. More colorways are coming with the combination of orange, red, and aqua pindots and I can't wait to see how they look. Although I was sure I had already looked at Fabric.com for the yellow with red dots print to no avail, now I found it so I can make the highly popular heart pot holder that everyone repins from Pinterest. Then three more fat quarters were purchased for only a dollar each for nice color combinations that aren't dots. Not everyone likes dots!

Fat quarters for new pot pad hearts?

And then, just because I still like to sew, I made up three pairs of leggings for my granddaughter, Emma. At four years old she likes leggings with "things" on them so I interpret that to mean no solid colors. Here are the fabrics I used to make size 5 leggings from Serger Pepper's great pattern for leggings.

It seems she not quite tall enough for this size yet so the waist is pretty high up. Next time she comes over I will have her bring them along so I can roll the waist down one turn and stitch again so they feel a bit better. Honest, it took me longer to change thread on the serger three times than it did to sew these little gems up. Just like Emma, they are one-of-a-kind.