Random musings
/One of the projects still hanging over my head is the fence art project, wherein I am sewing panels of canvas to hang across the top of the fence in the labyrinth.
You may not have known this about me, but I was a costumer in college (BFA in Drama & Theatre, UGA, 76) and sewing has always been a part of my life. For my burn theme camp’s labyrinth I sewed six football fields of straight stitching, so you might think that knocking out a mere 40 feet of canvas strips would be a piece of cake.
It would have been, if the sewing machine we’ve owned for 40 years now was not clunking into obsolescence. For the prototype panel and the one panel I have finished, I used one of the machines down at Backstreet, but that means getting out of the house and traveling the three blocks to the studio and can you even?
The obvious solution was to buy a new sewing machine. However, because of The Captivity there are no sewing machines to be had, not even for ready money. I signed up with JoAnn to be alerted whenever Singer started shipping my preferred model, but somehow that never happened. Instead, I was startled to see targeted ads telling me I could now buy it — from JoAnn. So I did.
Here’s the point: I didn’t go for the new, super-duper computerized models. Just a plain heavy-duty number was good enough for anything I’m going to be doing, and yet it still features all these bizarre little stitch patterns available for selection. (Does anyone actually use those any more?)
You may imagine my surprise, therefore, when this basic machine came with a little baggie full of these:
I mean to say, wot? The manual (which you have to download your own self these days) was not much more help:
Such an abundance of tools, almost none of which I have ever used. I mean, if you can’t stitch a buttonhole freehand, what kind of sewing person are you anyway? GET OFF MY LAWN.
Seriously, there were some attachments that I really do not know what to use them for, and the manual does not say. An overcasting foot? I think I know what that means, but why do I need it?
Anyway, I did assay the buttonhole foot for another project and am fairly impressed by the fact that it does automatically create a buttonhole the perfect size for the button you insert into its back end. Excelsior!
In other news, my 50 Postcards Project recently grew to 54 cards and outgrew its original box.
For one thing, I had more than a few cards which were too large to fit in the box. This is what comes of just grabbing whatever’s on your desk to Make the Thing That Is Not.
So it was with great delight that I came across a storage tub designed to store photos:
The thing I liked about it was that rather than one big tub to dump everything in, it has mini-boxes within it. Each holds 50 of my postcards, so it could be that I end up with 300 cards in the 50 Postcard Project.
Even better, it was on sale.
