A New Dress!

"Just what she needs....", I hear you grumble to yourself.  I cannot blame you really, I very rarely (about, ahem, twice a year) wear the dresses I make, dresses are just not practical.  I also think that some part of my brain tells me that if I wish to be seen as 'good' as any man, I must dress like one.  However, it does not seem to work!

Anyhow, back to the topic of the new dress, I actually am making this with a particular occasion in mind.  I intend to wear it to an awards ceremony in a week.  There was a large number of potential dress patterns to choose from but for various reasons I managed to narrow it down to this one only: Butterick B5281, picture below:

I am making view B with the capped sleeves and I will not be putting shoulder pads in mine.  After a trip to Spotlight I settled on some lovely red self patterned drapey jacquard.  The lining is a red lawn to give the dress some body.

Today I managed (in between making a batch of grapefruit pickle with some mouldy grapefruits and taking the dog for a walk) to cut the dress out and assemble the bodice, except for the sleeves.  The dress is fully lined which gives a lovely neckline without the frustration of a facing that keeps jumping to the right side.  Below are some random pictures from the construction.

Tucks stitched into the right hand shoulder.

The assembled bodice without the lining.

The assembled bodice with lining, I am happy with it!

Close up of neckline.

I am using my Singer 306 to sew this dress.  So far it is behaving nicely and making a very nice stitch.  I decided to use the straight stitch throat-plate in a fit of inspiration and it seems to be really helping.

On another note, it was the 23rd (!) anniversary of Freddie Mercury's passing yesterday, I was going to listen to my Queen CD but my CD player has finally given up the ghost so that plan went out of the window.

More updates to follow!

Elna Supermatic

Due to the amount of studies I have had recently, I had about a week were I did not work.  When I went back in on a Saturday morning there were three machines awaiting me.  One was a modern Brother overlocker, with no pedal (I'm yet to decide what I'm going to do with it), one was a Singer 5528, the second of them I've had in as many months and I keep meaning to devote a post to them and the third was in a very square metal case.  There was only one machine I knew for sure came in a metal case (Elna model 1) and this was the wrong colour, so I was extremely excited when I took the machine out.  It was a gorgeous Elna Supermatic, complete with ~11 cams plus the buttonhole attachment, a few feet and the cover plates for the feed dogs.  Half of the case forms the flat bed for the machine and the machine is a knee control (I love knee controls!).  This machine is made in Switzerland and has all metal gears and parts, that I can see, the body is aluminium and consequently the machine is not all that heavy.

It wasn't until a week later I found time to take it home and look at it, there is no way I am selling this machine, I am BUYING it!

Firstly I removed the cover from the free arm and the throat-plate just sprung off, the bobbin loads from the back, I then removed the feed dogs so that I could get the bobbin holder and the hook apart, for ease of cleaning.  The surfaces here have been de-rusted at some period in time as the chrome is less than shiny in parts.

To get the bobbin holder free from the hook there are two little screws (with little springs coiled around them) that need to be removed, they are directly opposite each other and the holes can be seen in the photograph below.  Just be aware they are very springy and are very easy to lose if they spring away somewhere.

 
The next thing I did was remove the base of the machine (remove screws circled in red in image below) so I could see up the pillar, it is incredible.  The motor and all the necessary electrical parts to control the speed of the machine through the knee control are mounted in there.  The motor is geared into the machine much higher up the arm and cannot be seen in the following photographs.

Finally I checked and oiled all the moving parts under the faceplate and cam door.  The faceplate cannot be opened unless the foot is down.  The machine is threaded by passing the thread down the back of the faceplate, through the tension, from back to front, and then through the take-up lever and then as usual.

Whilst I was oiling this machine I noticed it had a hard spot, I thought maybe something wasn't oiled properly but despite oiling all the usual spots the noise persisted.  When I actually plugged the machine in and ran it the noise increased with the speed (as was to be expected) and the machine clunked dreadfully.  It wasn't until a couple of days later I found enough time to go and look at it again.

It came to my attention that the noise was not always in the same place in the machines rotation, this implied the motor was at fault.  Eventually I disengaged the machine from the motor as for bobbin winding and the clunking continued, definitely the motor.  With the base removed it became obvious that every time the machine clunked the entire motor was moving, which it definitely was not supposed to do.  The problem was, how to see up the arm to see the gears?  I did not have the appropriate circlip pliers to remove the handwheel and try and see in that way but eventually remember we had a camera for seeing in confined spaces.  This worked and I can now say that to all intents and purposes it looks as if the gears up there are chipped and resulting in the machine not running smoothly.  When I am finally finished for the year (another 4 weeks) I intend to go through the painstaking process of removing the motor and actually being able to personally see the extent of the damage.  It is annoying to have such a beautiful machine, complete with accessories and be completely unable to use it!!  At least I only have to pay $10 for it as it is completely unsaleable.....!

New Garments

I am technically on holidays.  I'm actually still flat out, however I took a couple of days off and did some sewing.  First of all I finished off a purple shift I had.  I found this shift half finished at work and I was about to send it out as a rag when I thought that as it was my size I could finish it and wear it.  The previous owner had assembled the dress and put the zip in, really only the hem was left to do.  However, they hadn't under stitched the armhole facings and in finishing the outer edges of these facings had stretched them out of shape so that there was no way they were staying tucked into the garment.  I ended up topstitiching the facings to the dress.  It looks fine and there is no chance of them rolling out.  I also had to refinish the outer edge of the neckline facing as it had been hemmed by hand and was undoing.  I then hemmed it and I had a nice new shift dress.  I used the pretty silver Godfrey for this task.

The next project was a very pretty 1940's blouse with a peplum. It is a Simplicity reissue and extremely lovely!  I made it in a lightweight seersucker like fabric on my adorable 99K knee control machine.  This fabric has a line of damage running down its centre and is only approximately 90cm wide anyway, it makes cutting things out very difficult.  I got it (all 5 metres or so) free from work as it was only going to be thrown out and it was rather pretty.  I managed to find a piece that was fault free wide enough to cut the back out but it was difficult.  The buttonholes were made on a Singer 71-30 industrial buttonholer and came out very nicely, after about 20 trial buttonholes!  Although a size 8 I think it is still too big for me, the fact that it sits comfortably on the mannequin pictured below which is set to a size 12 probably backs me up.

In other news I have a gorgeous new machine, although unfortunately it is unusable at the moment.

Blue Jumper

I've been very busy with study at the moment but I do have two machines I keep meaning to write about.  Anyhow, I started knitting this jumper about 2 years ago, then I got RSI and didn't touch it for over a year.  Recently I picked it up again and have finally completed.  It is an old Patons pattern from about the '50's I think and knitted in 4ply.  Below are pictures.

Right, back to the books!

Water, Water, Everywhere...

It has been raining a lot recently.  It is also cold and at the moment blowing a gale.  Sewing machine wise there has been nothing recently and that overlocker is still doing my head in.  Anyhow, a few weeks ago I seem to remember promising to upload pictures of water droplets.  Below is that promise.

In case you're wondering, the first picture is water droplets on cactus spikes.  It has the longest spikes I've ever seen and I was rather anxious about doing my camera lens an injury with one.

Peace

Everyone finds a feeling of peace differently.  For me it's photography, being alone and considering the image, wondering how I can get a different effect, a shadow, a bright patch, translucency, mystery, sadness, loneliness, joy, freedom etc.  I don't get much time to just wander with a camera these days but here are some images from a week ago when I could do just that.

When one finds that peace, that comfort, one can analyse each thought rationally and carefully.  It reminds me of one of my favourite Dusty Springfield songs, although a lot of other people covered it too, 'Windmills of Your Mind'.
Windmills of Your Mind - Dusty Springfield

Janome Overlocker My Lock 234

I finally got to clean the Janome overlocker yesterday.  It was rather fluffy as overlockers tend to be.  I ended up taking the base off to get it clean and reach all the oiling points.

To get the base off, remove screws circled in red.

As can be seen from the above photograph there was a bit of cleaning to be done!  Once I had dealt with the bottom and oiled everything I took the top and side off.  I didn't do screw diagrams for these but it is simple, there is one screw holding the lhs on and two holding the top on, the top screws are under the handle.  There is an oiling point on the top of most overlockers and it feeds into a clever wick system.  I had an overlocker seize on me once and that was the problem, the wick was dry.  When you take the top off you can see the felt and wick system.

The tension is interesting on this at the moment and in the 10 minutes I had left to play with it I didn't get very far, with any luck I will manage better next time.  It does have a sharp blade though which is good.  From the front below:

I have some nice photos of water droplets from the most recent rain which will hopefully comprise the next post.