When I was 11 my mom signed me up for sewing lessons with her friend, a professional seamstress and tailor. It was summer, and knowing now what it is like to have kids hanging around the house all day, I’m sure it was a device to keep me busy. That, and I was fond of using her sewing machine to try to make things, and I know I asked for help about every five minutes. I made an outfit at my lessons — shorts and a camp shirt. I’m impressed in retrospect. No way I’d try something that hard now.

Fast-forward twenty-plus years and I have my own machine, a Singer just like my mom’s. It threads in exactly the same way too, ensuring that I never had to crack the manual. I plugged it in, wound a bobbin, and started to sew (straight lines only, as we’ve discussed before). This time though, my mom isn’t here to help me.

So after a few years of infrequent but ambitious use, trail and error, and plenty of machine and thread jams, I finally enrolled myself in a class about how to use your own machine — how to troubleshoot and clean it, what all those doodads that came with it are for, and what can it actually do (besides sew a straight-ish line). {Continue reading…}