It’s official, they are wearing woolly jumpers in hell.
After years of refusing to do something as girlie as learning how to sew, I am now in the process of producing cockpit cushions.
There is a lot of work on the boat that, not being an engineer or mechanic, I can’t really help with. So in a bid to do something practical, I have been introduced to Paddy’s industrial sewing machine.
As many of you know, the idea of me as a domestic goddess does not sit well – least of all to me. But I really do want to do something tangible, so I’m willing to give it a go. Besides, sewing canvass to make something for us to sit on isn’t the same as lace on frilly things.
The last time I touched a sewing machine was during manual classes at primary school – all i really remember about that is trying to race the thread off the material by slamming the foot pedal down. I also remember coming in one week to see a bit ‘Out of Order’ sign on the machine I usually used – I’m still giving myself the benefit of the doubt as to whether that one was my fault… I do remember making a really great deck chair in woodwork though – I’ve still got that.
So I needed some serious remedial lessons.
Enter the lovely Keri – a good friend of mine who I’ve always been a little bit jealous of because she made her own really funky clothes (she also had the best name for a clothing label I had heard in a long time ‘Snotbubbles!’).
The first step was to make a mock-up of a cushion out of Calico (the canvass for the cushions was a teensy bit expensive so I didn’t really want to be practising on them!) but we actually found material in a much better colour…
Unfortunately our lovely orange mock-up fabric turned out to be too flimsy for the machine – so now I’m back to boring but heavy-duty.
The next step was getting the sewing machine to behave – and this reminded me exactly why I never had the patience to take up sewing.
There are so many teeny tiny persnickity little things that can go wrong with the sodding machines and Paddy’s seemed to snarl up and screech to a halt every few seconds.
Paddy has a stubborn streak when it comes to technical stuff and, where I would have lost patience and given up in disgust, he finally managed to get the thing to work.
In the end it turned out to be a combination of thread tension issues, fabric that wasn’t strong enough, dirt on the thread and the thread spool thingie being pulled through the wrong metal doohickey (or something like that)
But once all that was fixed, the actually sewing was relatively easy. I haven’t got past the practising sewing straight(ish) lines on a bit of fabric part yet – but you’ve got to start somewhere.
I was amazed at how convoluted and technical sewing machines actually are. I don’t know why they have such a fluffy, girlie reputation – they are about as obscure as car engines to me.
Watching Keri take the thing apart and adjust it was pretty impressive actually – I was totally lost! She told me that machine maintenance was not covered at all when she took sewing at school, which I think is crazy since you pretty much have to dismember the things when something goes wrong. I’d like to think things would be a bit more progressive now though.
So I officially take it back – sewing isn’t just a girlie girl pastime. It’s a real, technical, practical skill that I am going to do my best to master without maiming myself or the cockpit cushions.
Wish me luck!
