Rescue Machines

I taught a Bernina serger mastery class on Wednesday at the quilt store south of town. The class is open to anyone who has a newish Bernina serger; it’s free to customers who purchased their machines at that store. The store offers similar mastery classes for people who have purchased sewing or embroidery machines.

I had two students. One had a Bernette air-threading model and the other had the L890, which is the serger like mine but with coverstitch capabilities. The class ran from 10-3, and that gave me ample time to cram as much information about their machines into their heads as I could. This was my first time teaching the class. I was not sure how best to structure it, but I was happy with how it went. The first hour consisted of most of my Serger 101 class material—threads, needles, basic serger operation, etc. (These were upgrade machines for both students.) After that, I took them through the stitches, starting with a four-thread stitch, then the three-thread stitches, the two-thread flatlock, and ending with the gathering foot and piping foot before we ran out of time.

I’ll do that class again in January.

I have four students signed up for tomorrow’s beginning sewing class at the Community Center, so I spent yesterday morning getting machines in order. I’ve picked up a couple of Janome entry-level machines at thrift stores on my travels. Even their lower-end models have all-metal guts. One of the machines went to live in Alaska for me to use when I visit the kids. The other is a Janome Jem, which is a sought-after model for taking to quilt classes. And in August, Sunnie found a Janome One-Step at the thrift store in Bigfork and brought it to me.

That poor little machine—judging by the stickers on it, it had been thrifted and re-thrifted several times, and I suspect that’s because someone got into it and mucked it up. The needle was stuck in the left-hand position. The plastic housing obviously had been opened at some point and hadn’t been put back together correctly. I cleaned and oiled the machine, put all the settings back where they were supposed to be, closed the plastic housing properly, then tested the stitching. It sews beautifully! Thank you, Sunnie! We will use it in class.

My friend Susan’s daughter dropped off a Singer 401 over the summer and asked me to check it out. There was an issue with the bobbin case. (She was not in a hurry to use it but I know she’s visiting this weekend and I want to get it back to her.) While I had all my tools out, I went over that machine, too, and fixed the problem.

I need to make time to tinker with machines this winter. Getting them up and running is so satisfying.

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I’ve found myself doing a lot of publicity work for both the homestead foundation and now for our church’s gift festival in November, and it’s a perfect example of how progress is not always positive. Publicity used to involve printing and mailing press releases to local newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations. Now, everything is done online, except that to submit a press release, you have to fill out an online form and—in many cases—create an account. All of that takes so much time. I spent 10 minutes yesterday morning creating and verifying an account in order to add information to a local TV station’s online calendar. When I was all done, I hit “submit,” and got this message:

Your event appears to be spam and will not be accepted!

The message came with no way to appeal that decision. I scoured the website looking for a contact e-mail without success. I’ll try again today, but I am not going to waste time on it.

I’ve also been frustrated by one of the local Facebook groups. We have two: one for Bigfork and one for Kalispell. The Bigfork one is so easy—I create an “event” for what I want to publicize and it goes right through. I’ve done the same thing for the Kalispell group but getting it past the admins is next to impossible. Sometimes (rarely) the event gets approved and sometimes it doesn’t, and I can’t figure out why. I’ve e-mailed to ask for clarification and gotten crickets in response. Sigh.

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After tomorrow, I have nothing on the calendar until next Friday, and nothing on the calendar the week after that. I plan to keep it that way. I’ve got to get my canning projects done and I plan to sew. I have so many ideas clamoring to get out of my head. It occurred to me the other day that I haven’t even begun to explore the possibilities of my coverstitch machine. I’ve only used it for hemming, and it has decorative stitch capabilities just like sergers do (top coverstitch and chain stitches). Much to do.