Well we spent the weekend at the boat, which was basically my excuse to take our new machine with us and see exactly what I have purchased, so on Sunday I took over the dining table and started unpacking everything. I have of course added to my original purchase of the machine....
My wife is finding it slightly surreal that I’m the one dragging her to the shops so that I can buy thread and scissors for my sewing machine, but she can never resist looking for new cushions so was quite happy to come along and browse, while I stood in front of hundreds of little plastic containers containing all sorts of weird stuff and tried to fathom out what I might need.
I settled for a few packets of various needles, some scissors, pins, and some heavy duty thread. I’m assuming I’ll have to go back a few times, but my wife does have her own sewing box (for her never used machine) and she told me to have a rummage and take what I want.
My machine did come complete with the original instruction book, so I had a read through and tried to set things up. As is often the case with these things, the instruction book was easy to understand once i worked out what it wanted me to do, but since I had no idea what that was I was initially a tad perplexed. So I switched to You Tube and found a really helpful video by a chap named Graham Wilson that I just followed until the machine was ready to go.
Within half an hour I had my bobbin wound, the machine threaded, and a bit of leatherette in my hands that was about to get mauled.
Things started ok. The needle went up and down and the leatherette was gently tugged away from me, with a neat little row of stitches forming behind the needle. Looked great to me.
I folded the material and decided to have a go with double thickness of the leatherette, and all was happy until everything stopped and jammed solid. I suddenly seemed to have about seven threads coming from inside the machine, and after a few minutes of gentle tugging it was obvious that they weren’t coming back out any time soon.
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So I decided it was time to take the machine to bits. Under the metal plate beneath the needle there was a lot of gunk. Probably decades worth of dust and fluff that had been gently marinating in sewing machine oil.
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I cleaned it out as best I could, put the machine back together and had another go at sewing. I realise I need to give the machine a more detailed clean and would welcome suggestions for a good tutorial on this and what type of oil I need to get hold of.
Since I’m planning some heavy duty sewing I thought it best to check that the machine has the required grunt for the job at hand, so had bought with me a roll of car seat belt strap that my dad had given me, working on the basis that if I can sew through that I should be ok with a couple of bits of marine canvas.
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As you can see, it did the job nicely.
However...
I noticed that the spacing of stitches varied depending upon the direction I was going on the material, and that the leatherette was fed through automatically in one direction but required help in the other. Is that normal? I tried fiddling with a lever that I think adjusts stitch length, but as far as I could tell that made no difference at all to anything - I was getting the same original stitch length in any direction regardless of whether the lever was set to 7 or 30, and nothing seemed to change that.
My other question is ‘how do I start?’
Do I have to go forwards and then back a bit to somehow tie the thread, or is it ok to just set off sewing? My brain keeps telling me that if I just set off then there is nothing to stop those first threads unraveling, but I’m not sure either way?
So that’s it. The machine works and seems to do exactly what I was told it would do.
My wife took one look at it in action and told me to sell her machine because she’ll never use it again, and then added that her sewing box was now my sewing box and any future thread based issues were now mine. In case you haven’t worked it out, sewing is not something she seems to enjoy.
I had fun. I’ve ordered some canvas to start practicing on, which should arrive this week, and she has ordered the material for the sofa (which won’t be here for around six weeks)
Decent marine canvas isn’t cheap - it seems to be around £25pm - which seems a tad pricey for a first attempt, so I’ve ordered some cheaper stuff from eBay for my first go and added another job to the sewing list for practice. That’s going to be a new canvas windscreen cover. Making one will let me have a go at all the techniques I’ll use for the rear canopy (I’m going to make it in three sections so I get to play with zips and velcro even though I don’t really need to) and i can afford to make a few mistakes on it as it’s something we will only use when we aren’t using the boat.
All being well I will start working on it next weekend.....