i can't

[dragonlady7]

ugh i'm trying to finish like, one handmade thing, one lousy handmade thing this whole year, to send to my niece in maryland, and it has to be done and then i have to wrap all the gifts and then i have to put them into the package and then i have to mail it and ARGH
it's not going well
none of it is going well and i just, it's way too many steps, i can't finish any of it and i have hit way too many little snags and i can't see my way around anything to finish it and it's all Too Much.

I got Dude's family's presents mailed off this morning; California is farther away. But mine is. I don't know. I don't know how to finish and i don't know what to do and I don't know how to make it work and it's too much. ARGH.

I have not yet begun anything for my family. (The package I'm talking about is for my older sister's family; I'm seeing the other two sisters and my parents uhhhhh sometime maybe I don't know.) (I don't even know what I'm getting that niece. I have not even thought about it. It's too much.)

ANYWAY it is all getting to me, I've just broken three sewing machine needles and I can't even explain all else that went wrong and I am OVERLOADED.

I would go to bed but I'm all worked-up now. Argh.

Comments

[dragonlady7]

Ha ha, I have a machine like one of those black-and-gold Singers, and I used it a lot, but I do too much with stretch fabric.
The newish Singer piece of crap is approximately perfect for me, except for it being a piece of crap-- there are a lot of little touches that make it really great to use. 1) built-in thread-cutter so you can just pick up your work and cut the thread. 2) drop-in bobbin, so you don't have to get the bobbin back in just so. also it's clear so you can glance at it and see if it's almost empty before you start sewing. 3) automatic needle threader. I mean, it's just a piece of plastic you flip down and it yanks the thread through the needle eye for you, but it's enormously helpful when it works, which is not all the time but often enough to be worth it. 4) 100 different stitches. I only need about 15, but. I need about 6, which is 5 more than my straight-stitch 1930s machine had. (At a glance, I use: 1) zig-zag, 2) lightning stitch (which is a zig-zag specifically for lingerie elastic), 3) overcast stitch-- less now that i have a serger, but still for small things 4) decorative stitches #16-84 just for various purposes of sewing wide flat seams of multi-layered things and why not make it look like a tulip or a doggie? I use the one that's just a wavy line the most often but there's also a Greek key stitch that's fab 5) buttonholes and 6) blind hem stitch.)
oh also 5) one-touch buttonholes, where you put the special buttonhole foot on the machine, put a button of the size you're using on the garment in the back of the buttonhole foot, line the thing up, and then just push the presser foot down and it goes until you have a complete buttonhole. I have used this A Lot. Mostly to make faux-grommet-holes for wall hangings and such, but. A Lot.


I'm not 100% sure that even an extremely expensive embroidery machine would *really* do everything I want. Really what I need to make this embroidery machine work is to have time to do hobbies, again, which I haven't had in a while and don't know when I'll have again.
I might loan it to my mother-not-in-law, though. She's asked about it a few times, and she's craftier than I am. (She was a professional tailor for much of her youth, and now in her retirement goes to craft fairs and such. As a vendor.)

Some of the issue is that I don't understand the software to create my own shit. What I really think the perfect use for this machine would be, is to do the large fill-stitch areas of designs that I could then do the outlining of and beadwork on by hand. That would be a feasible way of getting really luxe big embroidered pieces like I really want-- coats, wall-hangings, that sort of thing.
But what I need for that is time, time to plot out the pattern, time to program the files with the large fill shapes, and time to construct the hangings or garments.

I don't have any free time, so it's probably not going to happen. I barely use the serger and it has one (1) function, so.

The most tragic thing of all of it, I think, is that I really enjoy hand-sewing and find it intrinsically rewarding. But the problem is that hand-sewing is so time-consuming that I never wind up with anything I can use afterward, and I need, in my internal calculus, to finish things I make once in a while so that I can continue to enjoy the hobby, and so I save hand-sewing up as like, an extravagance. I love to really indulge myself and sit down and just. Hand-sew something.
So if I had nearly-complete machine embroideries that I could just sit down and hand-embroider finishing touches on? That'd be ideal.

But it's too complicated to get to that point. And yet, here I sit, sewing a bead into the eye hole of a unicorn that a little girl will probably not look at very much. :)

[potboy]

I do like the sound of auto-threading. And buttonholes! I do my buttonholes by hand, which is a complete pain and never looks as neat as machine stitched (and results in me making things with toggles and hooks because anything to avoid a buttonhole!)

I'm sure you'll get there eventually, even if it has to be very slowly. At least you have a unicorn to put an eye-bead into, so you're already achieving things :)

[dragonlady7]

It's true-- I got enough of the unicorn that I *could* finish it by hand in a timely fashion, so that's definitely something.

Automatic buttonholes are the only reason I have ever put a buttonhole into anything.
I don't mind going over an existing, shitty, commercial buttonhole and hand-binding it by the exacting and precise tutorial I printed off about historical buttonholes, but I have found that it only comes out beautifully in that case, never when i've tried to make a buttonhole from scratch.
So, even for historical costuming stuff, I use the sewing machine buttonholer to do a rough job first, get them trimmed open and all, and then just hand-stitch over it in like twelve layers until it looks correct. And then I get great results and everyone's like "oh you're so Skilled" and I'm like Only Singer Knows For Sure (TM).
(It's funny that so much of my early sewing experience was done for historical costuming-- I won't say re-enactment-- because I still have this conceit that if the finish is going to be visible it must have hand-detailing. Which honestly, is mostly just an excuse to do the meditative little detail work I find relaxing, but it is kind of funny because that's not... a thing... even in couture, hand-sewing has no particular prestige. But SCAdians especially, God, were so smug and cutesy and like, congratulatory, if you showed up in a machine-sewn FARBtastic polyester coat that you'd hand-bound the buttonholes of and like-- hand-overcast the neckline facing or something, where it was obvious you'd done it by hand, however crudely. OMG it was nuts and has sunk so deep into my aesthetic. LOL!)

[potboy]

*G* Yeah, I learned to sew at all so that I could make outfits for our Anglo-Saxon re-enactment. So all I ever used the machine for was inside seams - like you, anything visible had to be done by hand. Then I graduated to 18th Century re-enactment, which involved actual patterns and pleats and curved seams! That was a quantum leap of skill, but still involved finishing everything off by hand. And from there I went to making morris-dancing costumes. Some of which involve actual, proper nearly-modern waistcoats, but mostly it's just straight sewing tatters onto tunic-like jackets.

So yeah, I've hardly ever made anything where there's machine stitching on the outer surface - which probably explains how I can get away with such a basic machine. I still default to hand stitching if there's anything really complicated to be done, just because it's so much more controllable.