Astrogirl

I have been sewing, but I’ve been too busy to deal with the pictures. Since the projects aren’t on flickr, they aren’t appearing here yet. I’ve decided to forge ahead, because I might not photograph the finished item for weeks.

I used this pattern to make a halter top from a striped knit using View D, and I already posted that.

I then made a pair of pajama pants, and I did not post about that here, but I did at pattern review.

This time I uh, made another halter top, but View B. I made it in a black stretch poplin, and looks exactly like the illustration. It’s pretty awesome, but it has a Bra Problem. My normal halter bra shows bits of bra strap up near the collar, and the balcony bra is very uncomfortable, but looks awesome.

The instructions for the collar are weird. As this was helpfully mentioned at pattern review by at least one person, I read them about four times, and got it right without ripping any seams. I’ve gotten excellent results from all the Kwik-Sew patterns I’ve used, really.

After that, I made a green suede purse out of a pretty stiff pig suede. You’ve seen plenty of pig suede at the mall if you were shopping in the 80s. It can be very nice, or it can be stiff. This is too stiff, but the return shipping was expensive, so I kept the two hides. I used the tinyhappy tutorial again. I posted all about that here.

Top stitching the purse, things began to go wrong. I went through a section with 3 layers of suede instead of just two, and there was a bad, bad noise. The needle was not broken or bent. Usually, that’s what has happened when a noise like that comes out of the machine. After that, it would do nothing but loops on the bottom side — like if there was no upper tension.

So…I took all the case pieces off and had a look. I saw nothing that looked obviously wrong, and certainly nothing wrong above the feed dogs. Tino found a movie of how a sewing machine works, watched that, came in and messed with my machine. He showed me where the problem pretty much had to be. The part is the shuttle hook.

Not only did it need oiling and cleaning (now easy to do with everything apart), the plastic parts of the shuttle hook that need to be baby-butt smooth were ridged, marked and a general mess. This meant that when the thread top was supposed to be released, now holding the lower thread in place…it wasn’t released.

As getting a replacement part looked like a long-term thing — just trying to figure out who had the right hook for my Bernina was darn tricky, and the only one I was sure of was in the UK and 50 pounds — I decided to have a go at the hook. I used a cardboard emery board because none of the nice files would fit where I needed them to go. I used a nail ridge polisher in places…and it worked, sort of.

The new hook is still on order, and I could complete one project, but I had to remove the whole mess (which does not actually require disassembly of the machine — that turned out to be necessary), file and oil twice while I was sewing a little summer top…so now I’m waiting for the part. I eventually found it on eBay for 50 American Dollars instead of 50 British Pounds. It should be along any day now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Sewing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.