New Technology and Old Sewing Machines

I was paging through the latest Joanns circular the other day and noticed they are now selling these (list price $599.00):

I have no need for a 3D printer and no plans to get one, but I thought it was interesting that they have become mainstream enough to sell at Joann Fabrics.

I follow a woman up in Edmonton who has done some great YouTube videos on sewing machine repair under the name ArchaicArcane. She also has a Facebook page, and she posted there last week about having made a replacement needle plate for a customer’s vintage Kenmore using her CAD program and 3D printer. (I suspect her model is a bit more sophisticated than the ones Joanns is selling.) On that particular Kenmore model, there is a separate needle plate that fits into the throat plate. It can be flipped around for either straight-stitch sewing with a small needle hole or zig-zag sewing with a wider opening. Many times, that needle plate goes missing or it’s so chewed up as to be useless. She successfully made a replacement needle plate for her customer’s machine.

Making replacement parts for vintage sewing machines has long been a topic in the vintage sewing machine groups I frequent. The problem is that even if your mother owns a metal stamping plant and could—theoretically—make just about any part you needed, the quantities are so small as to be impractical. A 3D printer is a way around that, and I expect to see more hard-to-find parts coming to market as the price of these printers comes down.

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Vittorio, my Necchi BF, got a workout yesterday. We listened to sewing podcasts and ran up apron pieces.

I am getting a lot of use out of the two French terry Nancy Raglans I have made so far. The second one is out of some royal blue French terry that I ordered from Raspberry Creek Fabrics. The fabric was a bit of a disappointment, which is always a risk when ordering fabric online. I always wash and dry my fabric before sewing with it, even if I plan to line dry the garment when it’s finished. (Very little of my RTW wardrobe goes into the dryer because I have trouble finding garments that are long enough to begin with.) When this fabric came out of the dryer, it was stiff and rough and had picked up thousands of little pieces of white lint. It was almost too ugly to sew with. I went ahead and made the top and washed it again when it was finished, although I line dried it instead of putting it in the dryer. It came out somewhat softer and much less linty. I probably won’t buy fabric from that line again, however, and that’s too bad because it comes in all the bright jewel tones that I love.

I also bought a length of some heathered pink French Terry from Raspberry Creek. That fabric is by a different manufacturer and it feels much nicer. I haven’t sewn with it yet, but I am not expecting any problems. And I can safely say that while the coverstitch machine and I are not yet BFFs, we are well past the awkward new friend stage.

I am intrigued by this new design from Closet Case Patterns:

It’s called the Sienna Maker Jacket. Do I need a jacket? Not really, but I like this design. And I like the idea of wearing something like this instead of an apron when I am sewing, although it’s rather akin to wearing a chef’s hat while cooking dinner. After all, I am not working in a studio with other creatives. It’s just me and the dogs here. We’ll see. I may put it on the list. I especially like the closure even though I usually have trouble with anything belted. My torso is long enough that my natural waist doesn’t fall at the spot where belts are usually placed. I’d probably have to adjust that. The pattern also includes a cropped, non-belted version of the jacket, but cropped and I don’t get along for the same reason that belts are an issue. The proportions aren’t flattering for my shape.

I managed to find some sew-in industrial 2” wide Velcro, so fixing the husband’s gaiters is on the list for today. We got several inches of snow yesterday afternoon. I had gone upstairs to sew after lunch—and all of our windows are covered with insulated curtains, so I can’t see outside—and when I came down to make dinner, the landscape was completely white. He did say that it is wonderful having a “shed” to store all of his equipment in so he’s not shoveling snow off every morning.

Apples and Onions

I spent several hours at church again yesterday chopping vegetables and making applesauce. Libbie and Valeri are in charge of the kitchen for the upcoming gift festival, but making enough of three kinds of soup to feed hundreds of people is a huge job. Chopping onions is not fun or glamorous. It needs to be done, though, and Susan and I were happy to help out.

[Susan was commenting on my onion chopping skills on Saturday and how fast I was. Everyone thinks I like to cook. I am a good cook, but it is one of my least favorite things to do. I told her it was like the scene in one of the Little House on the Prairie books—or maybe in one of Laura’s memoirs—where someone commented on the speed and perfection of her (hand-bound!) buttonholes. She responded that she hated to do buttonholes, so she learned to do them quickly and well. That’s kind of how I feel about cooking. It needs to be done, but I don’t linger over it.]

Making applesauce is rather fun. Susan, with her master’s degree in botany, is something of an apple expert and loves to tell us about the different varieties. All apples are not the same. Some ripen early, some mid-season, and some are only really good after a frost. Some only keep for a few days and some keep for months. Some make good pies and some make better cider. Susan has 40+ varieties in her own orchard and knows about many more.

She brought New York 12, an old experimental variety, for us to use in making sauce yesterday. We’re way past the early apples that are really good for sauce, like Yellow Transparent or her Summer Rambo apples that we’ve used in the past. The New York 12 apples are a deep burgundy red with red-streaked flesh inside, and they make the most beautiful sauce:

This is not a doctored photo. The applesauce was exactly that color, the color of raspberry sherbet. We added a tiny amount of sugar—because we’re all picky about our sauce tasting like apples and nothing else—and that was it. This sauce, along with homemade rolls, will be served with the soup in the Village Cafe at the gift festival.

I am knee-deep in chasing down punch list items for both businesses now. The new Big Sky Knitting Designs website went live yesterday morning and I’ve already gotten some pattern orders, so at least the e-commerce part of it is working properly. Trying to manage two Instagram accounts is maddening—particularly because I had to add extra software to be able to post to IG from my desktop instead of my phone—so I am trying to move everyone from my personal IG account to the one for Buttercup Made. I need to post to the BSKD Facebook account, and I should probably set up one for Buttercup Made, too. Getting all of these ducks lined up, though, is keeping me from the one thing I want to do, which is sew. (The oft-heard refrain of owners of small creative businesses everywhere.) I did manage to sneak in some time late yesterday afternoon to do some cutting:

We’ve got a farm animal theme happening at the moment. I have an obvious weakness for chicken fabric. That’s only some of what’s in the stash.

I also sewed the binding onto the comforter that Elaine and I tied last week at sewing. Forward progress.

Did You Miss Me?

Well, that was an interesting couple of days. This blog is like visiting with a group of good friends, and when I can’t write, I feel cut off. I spent much of the time in non-glamourous website work, like making sure all of my domain names point to the same place. The husband prefers new construction to renovating old houses, and I am starting to feel the same way about websites.

So….some of the changes will be self-evident. My current activities are different enough from knitting design that they needed their own umbrella. I wanted something that tied into the Suck It Up, Buttercup blog, as that has been my online identity for almost a decade. The name also had to incorporate the making aspect and provide room for a business, if that should evolve. “Buttercup Designs” was too similar to BSKD and already in use in other places. When “Buttercup Made” popped into my head, it just seemed right, so I went with it. And “Made” is big enough to embrace a lot of different activities. Will I write a book? Maybe. Will I start designing custom workwear strong enough to withstand a beating by the husband? Perhaps. Will I open a homemade botanicals business? Who knows. I’ll probably begin by stocking the online store with aprons, pillowcases, and grocery bags.

If I have set this all up correctly (cross your fingers), the blog should now be part of the larger Buttercup Made site. However—and this is important to note—nothing else should have changed. Typing “suckitupbuttercup.me” into your browser’s address bar should still bring you to the site. E-mail notifications of new blog posts should still come to your inbox if that is an option you’ve chosen. The blog format has changed slightly. It’s the one change I’m not completely thrilled with, but I liked this template design more than the one I had been using.

The URL for the Buttercup Made site is buttercupmade.com. I also have an Instagram account set up under Buttercup Made, so feel free to follow me there. (I’ll start posting content there soon.) I don’t really want to set up Yet Another E-Mail Account specifically for Buttercup Made, so for now I’ll be using one of my current addresses. The Contact Form is set up to go to that account.

I am sure there are some bugs I don’t know about. If you run across any, let me know and I’ll do my best to track them down and fix them. And thanks for your patience. I need to do a last couple of checks of the Big Sky Knitting Designs website and that one should go live this week, too.

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I wasn’t completely held hostage to the computer last week. On Thursday, I went to see my naturopath. He has been my primary doctor for almost 14 years now, ever since my thyroid conked out and my previous doctor insisted that all of my symptoms (weight gain, fatigue, hair loss, etc.) were the result of eating too much and not exercising enough. (They weren’t.) He has been working with me all this time to see if we could fix what was wrong. And fix it we did. In the last year or so, I’ve been able to cut down the amount of thyroid replacement I was taking from daily to only 2-3 times a week. We’ll both be thrilled if I am able to get off of it entirely. I firmly believe in the power of the human body to heal itself given the proper support. I had a battery of labs done two weeks ago and he said all of my numbers were fantastic. Yay.

After my doctor’s appointment, I went to church for our monthly sewing meeting. Some of the ladies were finishing up a quilt and Elaine and I tied another comforter.

On Friday, Cathy and I finally got to meet for lunch—soup and salad at Panera. It was good to spend a few hours with her, catching up.

Yesterday morning, we had a short meeting here at my house to plan for Advent and Christmas Eve services, and then Susan and I went to the church and spent three hours chopping onions and carrots to go into the soups that will be for sale at our church’s Ten Thousand Villages fair trade sale this coming Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. If you live in the Kalispell area, please stop in! In addition to shopping, you can also enjoy one of our delicious soups (African Groundnut Stew, Indian Dahl, or Chicken Noodle) as well as homemade applesauce, cookies, and pies.

No pictures today, but I promise that I’ll get back into the blogging groove this week. It’s good to be back.

Going Offline For a Few Days

I had an epiphany yesterday while finishing up the last tweaks to the Big Sky Knitting Designs website. I had almost given up waiting for a bush to catch on fire and start speaking.

I’ve come up with a way to corral all of my activities in one place and have a store for my sewn items without opening an Etsy shop. (Although it can be nice to have a third-party entity handling the niggling details of running a business, the whole Ravelry debacle made plain the real disadvantages of that model.) I also came up with a business name that I liked that no one else is using. I even snagged the corresponding domain name.

When I set up the website for this blog, I did it in such a way that if I ever started another kind of creatively-focused business, this would be its home and the blog would become a subset of something bigger. I’m still not sure if or how this new enterprise is going to evolve, but it needs a place to do that if it’s going to happen at all. Having just finished building another website in Squarespace 7, I am much more familiar with the software and its capabilities. The renovations to this website shouldn’t take more than a few days. Please do not expect a giant rollout with a lot of fanfare! The changes will be small at first. (You should know that I hate to change anything.) I didn’t want to disappear without some explanation, however.

And we’ll all see what happens.