Monday, December 27, 2010

My First Attempt

DH and I spent yesterday at home just enjoying our Christmas weekend.  While he played a new video game, I decided to set up my sewing machine because I don't do well not having something to do and it was sitting so nicely in its box just calling my name.  The directions are definitely not written for someone who has no experience sewing.  I tried to use the DVD to thread my sewing machine.  It still wasn't working like I wanted it to.  I finally got it threaded and it wasn't working properly.  I used the trouble shooting guide and it wanted me to change the tension so I tried that and it still wasn't working.  That made the problem worse actually.  The thread kept breaking and I made some horrendous knots in my scrap fabric that I was practicing with.  It wasn't pretty. 

The sewing machine won the first battle.  I gave up.

I walked away and spent some time with DH.  We played the Xbox version of Monopoly (which was a lot of fun) and had dinner.  Then I asked him for some help.  I thought that maybe I hadn't threaded the machine properly and since his mind is much more mechanical than mine (and I struggled with the directions) I thought I'd have him take a look and see if he could find a place that I hadn't threaded it correctly.  He did.  It wasn't between the tension disks.  That still didn't fix it.  I was still struggling.  I couldn't get the lower thread to come up and then it got massively tangled a few times.  I started over.  Then he watched me attempt to sew and saw how wonky it went.  He also noticed how much the machine bounced.  So he held it down while I sewed another straight line of fabric.  It worked perfectly. 

It turns out that other than a minor threading issue (which we aren't even completely sure about), it seems to just be an issue with my cheap plastic table that I wanted to sew on.  So it will have to be moved to the desk that doesn't bounce all over when I want to sew.  That means less space (unless I move downstairs), but I'm willing to put up with that if it means finally being able to use the sewing machine that has been teasing me since Black Friday. 

Today, I'm going to attempt to sew some pillows with some really pretty fabric I got yesterday.  I'll post pictures in a couple days (we're finally getting a new card reader so I'll be able to post pictures!). 

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