Learning Blog 3: setbacks and progress

I’m super excited: I was able to turn the skirt I ripped apart last week and remake it into a blouse-thing.  It’s the first “clothing” I’ve ever sewn without a teacher!  What was really exciting was that because I didn’t have a pattern, I had to put it on and pin it how I needed it to fit.  The blouse is super simple, nothing fancy.  But what I’m most proud of is that I had to pin and sew a set of darts: folding the fabric into mini triangles so that it fit better rather than just hanging on me.  I’ll never wear it in public, but I’m excited to wear it around the house and feel proud that “I did it!”. 

The frustrating part of learning to sew this week was learning how to use the tension on my sewing machine.  The model I have is old enough that the tension needs to be manually adjusted, rather than the new models which automatically adjust.  I found a great website which has three different graphics demonstrating how to understand tension functions, rather than say “if your thread looks like this, do this to solve the problem.”  This reminded me of our reading this week.  Experts first seek to develop an understanding of problems, while novices search for correct formulas (pg 49).  Most sewing materials create cheat sheets for problems, but the website I read actually explained what causes tension and why loosening or tightening the thread helps solve the problem. 

However, I really felt the pressure of doing everything on my own this week.  While I was able to adjust the tension, and I could see how gradually loosening the tension slowly made the bottom thread go back to where it needed to be, I couldn’t solve the problem completely.  I took the tension as low as it could go, but I still had bottom thread popping up.  The thread also consistently bunched up and strangled underneath the fabric—and I’m not sure if that is a matter of tension or something else.  I did start developing a system to check if the needle was threaded completely.  I’m hoping my mother-in-law can look at the machine this weekend and help me understand if it needs oiling.  I finally just switched to a basic sewing machine a neighbor let me borrow, and finished the project in 15 minutes.  That was a relief!

When I first started this project I had goals to learn about different kinds of stitches, fabric, and the parts of the machine and what they were used for.  This was a very novice-based approach.  As I learn more about “real life” sewing, I’m learning it’s more useful to focus on not just function, but HOW parts achieve their function.  I think with my pfaff I’m going to need to be more aware of how parts work so that I can trouble shoot problems and fix them on the spot.  This is definitely more time consuming that being able to just sit and sew (like on my neighbor’s machine), but I think it will pay off in the long run.  And probably save on service repair costs too.