Of Sewing Machines and Mothers

Not to pick on Janome sewing machines, I have said many times on this blog how much I hate my Janome. There are lots of Janome lovers and believers out there, and no doubt there are some great Janome machines happily sewing away in some of your sewing rooms. Still, mine has never played nicely. It's a basic machine...the only way to make it more basic would be to remove the zigzag stitch. With Big Bertha in the hospital, I've brought out the unruly stepchild and vowed to tame her once and for all.

This morning I decided I'd make some of the blocks on my to-do list. Of course, I sewed a test strip and everything seemed fine. Enter my first actually sewing together of two strips of fabric and she started misbehaving right away. There was almost no tension on the bobbin, and so that wasn't surprising. Why she didn't act up on the test strip is anyone's guess, but I've always felt it was because she held a personal grudge against me.

Also, I ended up feeling a little like the Princess and the Pea. Big Bertha has so many automated features and conveniences that it's as if she constantly anticipates my needs and does whatever I need without my even suggesting it. For example, she has an automatic threader, and so I find myself silently saying, "What? You mean I have to thread the needle using my actual eyes and my actual fingers?" And she has a knee lift, which has caused me to bang my knee on the side of my sewing table at least half a dozen times this morning. Also, I can use my heel to raise the needle, which has caused me to stomp my heel hard onto the floor at least as often as I'm trying to lift the presser foot with my knee. It's a hard life, I'm telling you. This manual labor is for the birds. Big Bertha seems designed for my personal comfort, and I find myself whining at the Janome, "I'm feeling uncomfortable!!!"

So anyway...all of that to say that it got me thinking about how I ended up with this machine. It's a sad tale, and I'm here today to tell it. And this being Mother's Day weekend, it's a good time to tell it as well.

I learned everything I know about sewing from my Mother. Okay, I'll give it that one Home Economics class I took in the 8th grade when I made the most hideous skirt on record. If there were a hall of fame for ugly hand-made garments, this skirt would have been voted in unanimously. It did have a waistband, and that was the whole point. Still, I chose this gawdawful purple, orange, and black diamond pattern fabric. I wish I had a picture of it because it was ugly enough that anyone would have thought I made it as a part of some sort of stand-up comedy routine.

Here's my mother. I posted this picture of her on Facebook yesterday as a Throwback Thursday post:

She was a wonderful seamstress. If I know my mother, she probably made that dress she's wearing. She made almost all of her clothes, and she made most of mine too until she returned to work full time as a nurse when I was about 12. She was fond of making matching dresses for the two of us. Here we are all dressed up for Easter Sunday. I thought you might also get a kick out of our vintage camper. Our family of four traveled back and forth across the United States four times in this trailer.

I adored my mother. I can recall sitting in church beside her and asking her to make the folds in my dress look just like the folds in hers, and her making a sincere effort to comply, fussing over it for several minutes until we both found it satisfactory. Sometimes when she was really energetic, she'd make matching shirts for my brother and my dad too. Here we are visiting the Polynesian Cultural Center when we lived in Hawaii. My dad was taking the picture, but take it from me, his shirt matched the rest of us.

My brother would have been about 16 in this picture. No doubt he was mortified at dressing up in matching outfits on outings like this one.

When I got married in 1975, my mother bought me my first sewing machine. It was a refurbished Singer Stylist 347 just like this one:

It was a great little machine and I did a LOT of sewing on it. I made most of my own clothes when we were first married, but when the kids were born, I limited my sewing mainly to Halloween costumes for them. If my kids remember nothing else about me when I'm gone, I hope they remember these great costumes. Of course, there was a cat:

But my favorite was this shark. I still have it. Maybe some grandkid will want to wear it some day.

This little clown was the first costume I made for Erik when he was two. And Matthew wore it the first time he went trick-or-treating when he was about 18 months old. Just too cute. Don't you just want to eat him up?

As life got busier, I resorted to some of those costumes stamped on fabric, where you just cut them out and sewed them together. They worked.

So one day the zigzag stitch on the Singer stopped working. I took it in for repair, but then I picked it up and didn't test it myself until about 8 months later. When I tried sewing with it, the zigzag still didn't work. I tried taking it back to the shop, but the shop was now out of business. Go figure.

So then I made the colossal mistake of taking it to another shop where the guy told me that the machine was beyond repair, and that I really just needed to trade it in for a new machine. Knowing what I know now, I would have simply taken the machine elsewhere. It was a good machine, and now that I'm older and wiser, I would know better. Nevertheless, I let the guy sell me the Janome I have now, and I've regretted it ever since. Not only that, but my mother had passed away by this time, and leaving behind that Singer was like leaving behind a piece of her. I paid for the Janome and walked out of the shop with tears in my eyes.

Fast forward to today, and I'm still fighting with the Janome and regretting the loss of the Singer. I think the Janome and I just got off on the wrong foot with so much baggage attached to it. Maybe the two of us can call a truce while Big Bertha is being nursed back to health.

Regardless of what happens, I'm still going to miss my mother on Mother's day, as I do every year.