turning*turning

For Christmas, my mother generously bought me a new sewing machine. She had wanted to get me a very fancy machine with a computer and all kinds of embroidery features. But I didn’t want a fancy machine. I had plans to buy myself a new ultra-basic machine. As far as I’m concerned, a fancy computer in a sewing machine is just one more things that can go wrong! (Or, one million more things, depending on how you look at it.)  And I sort of want to work on my hand embroidery this year. I am a single woman living in an apartment. The sewing machine sometimes has to go into storage, sometimes gets bumped around from kitchen table to the back of my car, and generally needs to be, well, a work-horse rather than a show-pony. As with everything else in life, I reasoned, simpler is better when it comes to machines.

This attitude has developed over the past 20 years as I’ve sewn on my old Elnita. It was a Christmas gift from my mother when I was 13 years old, and could only accomplish the very most basic of functions. I could, in most instances, crack open the machine and make minor repairs and adjustments on my own. I could count on it to work, day or night, and that’s what mattered.

You get the feeling from this machine that even the backstitch function is sort of a luxury. In addition, no matter how many times I had it professionally serviced, I could never get the tension quite right and the variable stitch-length was severely compromised. I constantly sewed with the length set to 4 mm in hopes of getting a stitch of 1.5mm or more. I learned to work around these and other quirks, though.

I’m grateful that my mom let me have some input into the new machine. It’s a solid, basic machine that has every feature I need plus a couple of luxuries (needle up/down control!) which will make my life a lot easier without complicating it unnecessarily. In a nutshell, that’s my life mission.

Goodbye, old Elnita. You’ve been a good girl.

No related posts.