Today's The Day!

[rhodielady_47b]

This afternoon at 3 pm I'm to have my 30 minute lesson on the library's serger machine. Please wish me luck everyone!

Later, after I get back home I'm going to continue cleaning and straightening up the front room. (I already spent three hours on it this morning.)

The worst part of the job will be organizing my patterns into their separate bins.

Comments

[mairi_dubh]

I wish you good work, good learning, and good success!

[rhodielady_47b]

Things didn't go as planned. Apparently someone "monkeyed" with the serger over the past few days and something is either missing or broken.
Since we couldn't do justice to the serger, we went forward and I made friends with the Singer Curvy sewing machine they also have.

I will probably have more fun with it than I will with the serger, truth to tell. One thing we agreed upon: The library badly needs to order some button-hole feet for their sewing machines and hopefully soon!

:^)

[mairi_dubh]

And what does a "Curvy" Singer do that other Singer machines don't? I've not heard of a "Curvy." Googling, I'm sure, would tell me some things, but yesterday was your day which got...um...re-done, more or less on the fly, so it seems to me you ought to have the dubious pleasure of talking about this machine.

I have clear recollections of hand-sewing buttonholes when I had only that means of making them, and being disappointed when at long last I acquired a buttonholing attachment at the appearance of those machine-made buttonholes. Eventually, a machine with a built-in buttonholer joined my first one and some time after that (I think!) I read somewhere---maybe Threads Magazine, maybe somewhere else---that hand-done buttonholes, beautifully evenly stitched, are a hallmark of custom sewing and custom tailoring and worth the investment of the time they take to do.

In fact, there's a machine-made buttonhole-making trick of going over your buttonholes twice by machine as you make each one to make them look more hand-sewn!

[rhodielady_47b]

Take a look. THESE are the machines that the library has:

In all honesty, I'm not a fan of buttonholes either hand-made or machine-made.

It was a happy day for me when I found a blouse pattern with a hidden button placket on it.

:^)

[pondhopper]

Good luck! After the how to use it lesson, you can then reserve it to use on your own?
What a wonderful thing for a library to have!

[howlin_wolf_66]

Good luck! :-) *hugs*

[rhodielady_47b]

Unfortunately the serger had been messed up by someone who didn't give a @#$%*! about the damage he was doing.

Sergers are delicate beasts with very complicated innards. I can see that it's going to take me a while to "figure out" how best to use it. Just getting the serger threaded might take between 15 minutes (on a good day) to well over 30 (on a bad day).

The beauty of using a serger (I think they are called "overlockers" in England) is that they finish seams so that the fabric can't unravel. Sergers can also sew stretchy fabrics and produce a stretchy seam which a sewing machine can't.

:^)

[mairi_dubh]

M'mnh.

Actually, there are some admittedly primitive work-arounds for sewing knit fabrics on a straight, lock-stitch machine.

And even my workhorse White, which is not a serger/overlocker, has some stitches which allow the seam to stretch. Take a look at some of the stitching on brassiere bands: you see that zigzag of three straight stitches (on an angle), then a pivot and three more straight stitches mirroring the first three, then another pivot and three more straight stitches, and so on, and this is done on power net or its equivalent.

A zigzag stitch, reasonably wide which might prove to be the widest setting available on a given machine or model, and at the correct relative length with the thread tension loosened a mite, will allow the operator to sew stretchy fabrics.

[spikesgirl58]

Best of luck! :DD