Are You Ready?

 It's been a busy time here, getting ready for a garage sale as well as buying and restoring sewing machines (and sewing). Although I've had sewing machine garage sales where I put out thirty to forty sewing machines and sergers, this time it's just a garage sale except there were three tables of fabric and three or four tables of jewelry. You read that right: jewelry. Along with hot mitts, towels, ironing board covers, and a whole lot of other sewn items, my craft fair booth has included tables of my husbands collection of jewelry for sale. Scouring garage sales, thrift stores, and antique shops, he collected quite a bit of vintage jewelry, some to refashion, some to clean up, as well as supplies to make new earrings, bracelets, and necklaces. Although he did fairly well, by now he was tired of those boxes taking up space and making him feel guilty for losing interest in this hobby.  He decided to sell it all at a garage sale so we plunged into  those boxes and priced everything for sale at about 90% off of our original asking price. Although it took a whole weekend and many other nights, we got it all done. Here's what it looked like when we took photos for the ad:

Table full of jewelry!

Jewelry making supplies

Table full and waiting to be taken out to the driveway

Along with the jewelry, I went through bin after bin of fabric to remove anything I knew I wasn't going to use. It wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be and rather cathartic. There were pieces I ended up with as part of a package deal that I had not picked out myself and really didn't even have any money into them, fake fur from fifty years ago (no kidding), and vintage linen left over from my collection that I was not going to use. It all was measured and priced, put in plastic bags, for a huge amount of sale fabric. 

It was a heat warning day when we opened up, vowing to close at 3 pm when the heat would peak. On that first day we sold as much as the next two days combined despite the heat. All of the jewelry making supplies were sold and about half of the jewelry, same as the fabric bundles. It was great but we planned on having the sale two weekends in a row and our stock looks pretty weak in comparison to when we started. We can't/won't produce more jewelry but I can keep going through fabric bins to see what else might be sold. Yes, there were bins that didn't get sorted yet so I have more work to do!

While this was going on I continue to buy sewing machines and have a few that are pretty nifty: Singer 201, some plastic Singers, two Montgomery Wards machines, White sergers, and the best of all, a Singer 1200. I loved the 1200 I bought last year and was sorry to see it go so when my husband and I stopped at a thrift store on senior discount Tuesday and spied this lovely, it came home with us. Unfortunately, it started to emit a thin stream of white smoke from the motor so I knew it was going to need to be rewired. Following Rain's series of blog posts on How to Rewire a Potted Motor, I'm almost done but it has been quite a job. As it turns out, this motor had been rewired previously so it didn't seem like it was going to respond well to another attempt. Since I had another Singer 201 potted motor in a machine with terrible cosmetic flaws, I was able to exchange parts between machines to ensure at least one would be safe and working. 

When putting it all back together, I noticed the 1200 had some electrical tape on the controller box, what is used as a foot controller in this model.

Inside of the controller box and wiring

It was easy to rewire the controller, no splicing needed but now much safer:

New wire added, ready to be installed

It continued to smoke and the motor was hot to touch so something was still wrong. After much reading about the possible problems, I ended up taking a motor from another 201-2. This time it worked great except that foot peddle wasn't as responsive so it would keep stitching even when I removed my foot. More adjustments but this is minor and I'm happily sewing on it now out in the garage.

It's swimsuit season and I've stitched up six so far: two for each the nieces in Michigan and one for each of my granddaughters.  I got carried away with the nieces and not only made the suits but also tote bags with their names:

Suits and tote bag for Frannie

Suits and tote bag for Vivi

Both girls are on swim team and have to wear regulation swimsuits but for when they are home in their own pool they can have "fashion" suits. I loved making them up, making them feel special. My niece said they loved them and I even got thank you cards.

Which machine did I use? My Bernina 1100DA serger, of course, but this time I bought a new toy for it to play with: an elasticator foot. It was my hope that it would make sewing on the elastic in the swimsuits five openings easier but there was a learning curve that almost made me want to give up. Even though you feed the elastic into the foot and there is a tension dial, you still need to figure out how much tension you should add when the elastic is in your hands. This enabled me to add more tension on the back of the leg openings and less on the front of the legs. By the time I was done with the four suits I was getting the hang of it. The next two suits were for my granddaughters and it was much easier

Evelyn's dinosaur swimsuit

That's enough for now and I hope to continue writing about sewing machines and my adventures with them but for now I'm just enjoying sewing with all the different machines. Who wouldn't?