Unboxing the 3000

What have we here?

I know I said I wasn’t going to take it out of the box until after the holidays, but the box was in my way. Also, my mother brought me a pair of her pants to hem. They are a velour knit and need to be done on a coverstitch. Turnabout is fair play, I suppose, and it won’t take long to get this machine up and running.

The accessories:

Underneath, a machine! How exciting!

And here it is.

This new machine is very similar to my old one, although beefier and more polished. This machine also has the ability to do a top (decorative) coverstitch.

For those of you wondering what a coverstitch is, look at a hem on the nearest T-shirt. I most cases, it will look like two parallel lines of stitching on the outside of the garment. On the inside, there should be a looper thread that zig-zags back and forth between the two lines of stitching and covers the raw edge of the fabric. The tricky thing about coverstitch machines is that you sew with the outer, public, side of the garment facing, so you can’t actually see the edge of the hem you’re trying to cover. In essence, you’re sewing blind. You hope that when you’re all done, the machine hasn’t decided to skip a stitch somewhere and wreck the whole hem. I’m looking at you, old coverstitch machine.

On athletic wear or kids’ clothing, you will often see a decorative line of stitching on the outer side of the garment where seams come together. That’s a top coverstitch, and not all domestic machines can do that. This one can. It’s a feature I am looking forward to playing with.

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My mother, sister, the girls, and I have a tradition of having a spa day at either Thanksgiving or Christmas. We’ve missed the last couple because of the pandemic, but yesterday, the four of us went to The Lodge at Whitefish Lake for massages. (DD#2 is here, but DD#1 and her husband are enjoying their first Christmas alone together up in Alaska.) I used to have a phenomenal massage therapist. She had had a traumatic brain injury as a young adult, and as a result, she discovered she could “see” damage in people’s bodies. I asked her once what it looked like and she said it appeared as an area of blackness. I never had to tell her what what bothering me when I went in to see her—she knew as soon as she looked at me. Unfortunately, she moved to another state and I haven’t had a good massage since.

The massage therapist I had yesterday was almost as good—good enough that I will probably go back to see her every few months. Gardening keeps me limber, but I tend to lose some of that flexibility over the winter.

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The husband will be home today, probably spending the day out in his shop. The concrete batch plant shut down for two weeks. I feel like I should send them a thank-you note because that means he can’t pour anything. Also, we’re supposed to get a shot of arctic air this weekend with highs in the single digits. If there is one thing that can force him to slow down and take some time off—which even a bout of shingles couldn’t do—it is the weather. He’s also going to look at The Diva for me, because it is exhibiting a weird stuttering start when it’s cold and rainy out.