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ughhhh
“Self,” I says to myself, “you gotta get off your computer,” and I wasn’t wrong, I got a lot to do, I gotta clean my whole house, I live in a sty like a crazy hoarder and it’s just a shitshow. And i hits on this great idea, I’m gonna make myself feel better about everything, see, I’m going to declutter some of the living room by taking all the clothing alteration projects I got sitting in a giant pile, and doing some of them.
This would have several benefits, among which would be a sense of accomplishment and also taking some of the clutter and tidying it up by changing it from the to-do pile and putting it into the general disasterfest that is my clothing. Cool.
So I get a bunch of t-shirts I was going to make dresses out of, because see, I’m real fat, and none of my clothes fit, and my solution is that all the shirts that are now too short could be cut up and made into dresses that are long enough, and then as a bonus I don’t have to wear pants. Side issue: since I have too much shit I’m not allowed to buy any more shit, so. No fabric, no new clothes; no, I’m going to cut up the old ones and make new ones out of them, or throw them away. (I already set aside the ones that were nice enough to donate. Oh, none really were, because most everything, I tried to keep wearing even though I was fat now, so it’s all stretched-out or oddly-worn or just worn out anyway, also I don’t generally own nice things so why start now.)
So I got a good start; I made a list, wrote down plans, and cut up the things that needed to be cut up. So far so good.
Now to sew back together these pieces so I have a finished thing.
HAHA HA HA HA that involves using machinery. (Mostly swearing under the cut, but I don’t actually injure myself so I’ll take it as a net positive.)
OK, I own a really nice Singer sewing machine, about 5 years old. My sisters pooled together and bought it for me for my birthday one year, and it wasn’t one of the crazy-expensive ones, but it was not cheap. (Like $400?) It broke immediately, I brought it back, they fixed it. Rinse and repeat; it broke three times in a year, and they fixed it three times, and I can’t complain, they treated me well, but it’s only got a one-year warranty on it, and that’s kind of fucked-up, because the other sewing machine I’d been using at the time was my grandmother’s and it was 50 years old and worked great. But. That’s just how things are now; literally nothing is built to last. If I want cool stuff like computerized stitch patterns and auto needle-up and lightning stitch and 1-step buttonholes, I have to deal with the fact that the thing is going to break. (If I don’t, I would still have to deal with the same thing; non-computerized modern machines are also either For Shit or A Million Dollars, so. Yes, I could’ve bought a Pfaff or Bernina or something but I was trying to spend less than The Moon, and that, it turns out, was a misguided idea.)
It’s broken, currently. And I brought it in, and they were sort of snippy to me, and corrected the Very Obviously Wrong threading (that was wrong because I’d just had to lug the thing across town, and I said, it wasn’t like that at home, I guarantee that’s not the issue), and then sewed with it for a moment and said… oh. hm. yes. It’s missing the left stitches when it zig-zags. It ah. It’ll work, still, but you’re going to have to send it out and it’s not under warranty.
So I’m going to do that at some point but it’s just never at a good time, you know? And i know it’ll be at least $150, and i have to steel myself for it. That’s how repairs work. I’ll be lucky if it’s less than the purchase price of a new machine. That’s how our economy works; things are built by cheap foreign labor, but must be repaired by expensive domestic labor. That’s just reality.
Anyway. The sewing machine was fucking up so much (not only missing every left zig, but also randomly breaking the thread every three or four inches of linear progress, which Gets Old, but hey it has an auto needle threader how did i live without that?) that I just gave up and switched over to the serger, which worked for long enough for me to accidentally sew something inside-out to itself. (Why did I think this would work? Oh because I’m learning disabled. Duh. To be fair, though, plenty of non-disabled sewists do dumb shit like that all the time, I’m not that broken-up about my own Problems.)
And then the serger somehow… dethreaded something, and now it’s not sewing loops, it’s just giving me four unconnected threads. Threading a serger is The Worst Thing, and so I’m going to just… shove all the stuff I’ve cut apart into carefully-labeled plastic bags, pack it all away, and forget about sewing for another little while.
(It’s funny, the sewing machine and the serger cost about the same. The sewing machine has all these convenience features, like a little lever you pull that threads the needle for you, and built-in threadcutters, and the like, and the serger has, like, aggressively unusable features. You need three hands, a magnifying glass, and two pairs of tweezers to thread one of the needles. Changing a broken needle is, like– you need an act of God. I had to go out and buy little allen wrenches so I could change the needle; the sewing machine has a thumbscrew built in that you can tighten with your hand so it’s zero trouble to change a broken needle. They just have totally opposing philosophies. Even the most user-friendly serger has as the first page of its manual the slogan “abandon hope all ye who enter here” because they’re fucking impossible to use.)
This is why I hand-sew so much. Sure I stab myself and it takes forever, but I’m not dependent on these incredibly frustrating machines.
