Seam Screams

I sat down at my sewing table a few Saturday mornings ago with two free hours to work on a skirt that was nearing completion. It was the home stretch—the satisfying yet infuriating stage of garment construction in which you can see everything coming together and are eager to get ’er done and try it on—and I was happy to have enough time to finish the last seams and start planning my next project.

I pressed and pinned the waistband and started to sew. When my machine made a weird noise a minute or so later, I was irritated but not particularly worried since it does that, being the finicky, annoying creature it is. Sure enough, a quick check suggested that the problem was in fact simple: the bobbin had run out of thread. Easy enough to fix. I wound a new one, carefully placed it back in the innards of the machine (man do I hate a front-loading bobbin), rethreaded, and went to pick up where I’d let off.

It wasn’t meant to be, for while I was attending to the bobbin, some other part of my emotional-support machine had staged a mutiny. The hand wheel wouldn’t turn; the needle wouldn’t lift. I started to panic.

I used all the tricks in the book of machine-taming techniques I’ve written in the year or so I’ve spent attempting to cajole it into working as advertised, but no matter what I did, no matter how many Youtube tutorials I watched, no matter how many Reddit threads I read, no matter how times I Googled my sewing machine’s make and model followed by “is broken help me please I’m desperate,” it simply refused to sew more than a stitch or two before jamming. I gave it one more cleaning and oiling and then took a breather to come up with a reasonable plan of action that didn’t include erupting into tears and/or taking a sledgehammer to it.

Option one: have it professionally repaired. This seemed like a practical, measured response, so I called the technician who saved my machine—and my sanity—for the low, low price of $150 when he made a house call in the fall. He agreed to take a look the next day, which was very generous of him but would come with a price tag of an additional $150, approximately a third of what the darn thing cost to begin with.

Option two: bite the bullet and replace it. Now, if this were an isolated incident or just a minor hiccup in an otherwise healthy and mutually beneficial relationship between woman and sewing machine, coughing up the money for the technician would’ve been a no brainer, especially since I’m a great believer in repairing when possible rather than filling the landfill with cast-off appliances and other doodads that have been relegated to the graveyard of household goods that could be fixed with a little effort. The fact of the matter, however, is that my relationship with my Janome is complicated at best, toxic at worst, a fact that’s become harder and harder to ignore the more my skills have improved. Indeed, while I’ve matured as a sewist (and person), my machine has failed to grow with me: if anything, it’s regressed. I therefore reluctantly concluded months ago that it wouldn’t serve my long-term needs.

Breakups are nevertheless hard. Feeling guilty about abandoning the machine that brought me back to sewing, I hemmed and hawed and alternated tinkering—hoping for a miracle—with weighing the pros and the cons of various replacements before deciding to go ahead with the repair, thus restoring my Janome to working, resellable condition and buying myself time to figure out what future sewing partner to invest in rather than rushing into a purchase that I might regret later.

While I accepted that this was likely the best and most responsible way to go, I didn’t like that it was so. Who, after all, wants to sink a chunk of cash into something you resent to begin with, something with which you squabble on a daily basis, something that punishes you with skipped, irregular stitches and inexplicable breakdowns for the simple act of daring to use it? And then there was the fact that I’d lost an entire day of treasured sewing time to a problem I’d done nothing to cause yet was of course 100% blaming myself for. Keeping me going, though, was the promise of a dream machine entering my life in the nearish future. A light at the end of the tunnel.

I promised my husband, who was rapidly tiring of my deliberations, that since this was seriously, definitely a final decision, I’d cease and desist with my obsessively attempting to figure out what was causing the jamming. To my credit, I indeed laid off a little. Not entirely—I was mildly distracted all day—but this was better than being so stuck in an anxiety vortex that it was impossible to think about or do anything else. After dinner, however, while immersed in warm, soapy water, I could resist no more and resumed watching sewing-machine-repair-related Youtube videos. (Yes, I bring my phone into the bath with me. Sue me.)

In short order, I stumbled upon an elderly man somewhere in the midwest, a wisened sewing sage who offered a potential answer. Towelled off and allowing myself a thread of hope, I casually told my husband that I had to tidy up my sewing table before we could commence watching our documentary of the evening. A lie, sure, but one as white as the blindingly bleached sheet I bought at the thrift store with the intention of upcycling it into a shirt.

All it took was a single drop of oil in the one location I hadn’t thought to apply it. The hand wheel turned. Could this be the miracle I sought? I sewed a tidy-ish row, confirming that the Janome was revived. It groaned with the disconcerting sound of a machine still either ill or embittered, and the stitching left much to be desired, but behold! Over the course of mere hours, I’d obsessed my way to the status of near-professional sewing-machine repairwoman, so ten points to Team OCD.

In a sense, this was the best possible outcome. Not only could I cancel the actual professional’s house call, thus sparing myself both expense and guilt, but I could also still justify purchasing a nicer machine. Two frustrating days later, two days marked by countless ripped seams and curses muttered at my Janome, I made the final call: I’d get the computerized model I actually wanted rather than the model that would’ve been totally fine but not perfect. The next morning, I bought it.

I suggest you stop reading here if you don’t wish to be subjected to crafty wordplay. You have been warned.

My Bernette arrived on the Friday. I don’t want to cut corners expounding its virtues, so I’ll put a pin in it for now and write a properly long post about it after we’ve had longer to mesh. Needleless to say, sew far, sew good: the transition from my mechanical machine to this stunner has been a true Beauty and the Baste story. (Now that I got that out of my system, it’s time to stop—after one last hem dash, that is.)