Chasing Grace

It was an uneventful weekend, aside from collecting my sewing machine from the repair shop. It’s been languishing in storage (i.e. gathering dust in my front room) for years. I am so happy to say it’s feeling much better now.

This is my poor old sewing machine. We’ve been through a lot together. I’ve had it for years, and used it heavily when I was living in California. I made a lot of my own clothes back then, including a wool coat, a faux fur coat, many handbags, and a wedding dress (…er no, that one was not for me). The trickiest thing I made was a velvet formal strapless sheath with a fish-tail hem in back, and hand-made bridal lace trim. It was more work than the wedding dress. After many years of faithful service it became very tired and no longer wanted to function properly. The zig-zag had completely stopped zig-zagging, and rather than a making nice straight seam, it tended to create complicated knots with the bobbin thread as I stitched. As this coincided with my general seamstress burnout at the time, I packed it away with a sigh, thinking to have seen-to someday. It made the long trip with me when I moved here, and has been sitting waiting faithfully for me to finally get it fixed.

It needed cleaning, oiling and all sorts of adjustments. This put quite a dent in our weekly budget, but I really need/want to start sewing again, and Paul insisted. I’m glad I kept it all this time, it’s a good solid machine. Most of the case and all the inside parts are metal. Now that it’s received some TLC it’s running as if it was new again. We took it to a place in Nashua called Neveretts Sew and Vac that came very highly recommended by the ladies I worked with at the library. Neveretts is a first-class shop and well worth every penny, as much as it might have hurt our budget.

Last year I managed to coax a vest out of it for Paul. But never completed it because I couldn’t make the button holes. Well, I could have, but I’m too lazy to do it by hand. So the first thing I’m going to do is finish the vest… finally!

So now I can add sewing to beading in my quest to earn a living. I have to go through all my hoarded fabric (yeah, that made the trip across country too) and see what I can create that folks might want to buy. Between that and all the jewelry I have yet to photograph and put in my Etsy shop I’m going to be very busy this week. But it will be a good kind of busy.