Lydia

One of the more beautiful sewing machines is the Necchi Lydia, designed in Italy, an oh so sleek and appealing:

Necchi Lydia 544

Many of us have fallen prey to its beauty only to be lured into a relationship that wasn't going to be. In an earlier post, Vacation in Paradise, I tell how I bought a Lydia MK2 only to find its fatal flaw early on: a cracked camstack. It sits on a high shelf with other parts machines and I can say I enjoy looking at it but I buy sewing machines for practical use, not beauty. How did I let this happen again?
I found a Necchi Lydia 544 at a resell shop for a price I couldn't resist and the camstack wasn't crumbling so it came home with me. It did have a broken hook gear and I looked into purchasing a new one for about $50 but then reason took over. In the meantime, I bid and won another Lydia 544 and this one did come with a cracked camstack but also a nice set of hook gears. Perfect! But now I've been working for weeks to get this machine to actually form a stitch. Here's a bit of the saga of how this proceeded.

Here's the set of gears that needed replacing:

Hook drive gears in black

Of course, it's never just replacing the gears but also adjusting the feed dogs and their timing:

Feed dog mechanism (see hook gears on bottom)

But the Lydia has their angled hook gear with many, many adjustments:

Bobbin case on hook (doesn't look angled!)

There's depth, angle, and other little bits that can bee too close or too far apart:

Bobbin case (very angled)

As I said, after a few weeks of working on it, I now need the workspace so I reluctantly put it back together and set it aside. This feels like failure but I know it can be helpful to keep thinking about it and looking at it later with fresh eyes. All right, it is failure but I need to move on.

The big warning that is given with replacing gears on the Lydia is the progression of deterioration. You might replace the hook gear(s) only to find the gear that drives the camstack needs replacing, then the motor pulley, then the camstack itself... you can see this is a slippery slope when the same material is used in these gears and they are all aging out. Although I understand this I'm still drawn to its beauty and the hope of getting it running again.

As I made space available I got out a serger and put it to use refashioning an item of clothing. I bought this large pair of lounging type pants in hope of making them over into leggings. Here's how they looked half way done:

Flowing pants to leggings

Those were one wide pair of pants! I needed to take in the waist more and they are super long but very soft fabric and not too bad when they were finished. This lead to tackling the pile of mending that is about halfway done but it's game day in Minnesota and we have the Vikings in the playoffs. To say we are optimistic is a bit of an understatement as we are completely nuts over the prospect of our home team playing in the Super Bowl let alone on home turf. So what an I doing about this? Why, making Viking hot mitts, of course. Later, gator...

Hot mitts ready to sew (they really are purple!)