I absolutely hate sewing. Yet every so often I get this uncontrollable urge to drag out all my sewing crap and drive myself batshit crazy while fucking up some really nice material.

I have a really nice old sewing machine. A couple of years ago (during my last uncontrollable sewing urge) I had it refurbished. I remember the guy saying it was always better to get this old machine repaired than to buy a new one as the newer models are – like everything else – not built to last.

So I know it’s not the machine. I know it’s me. You know when people say they know just enough about a subject to be dangerous? That’s me. I can load the bobbin, I know the mechanics of the machine, and I can easily figure out patterns and how to get the material into the proper position to get the final product.

I can never figure out how to set the tensions for the material. That’s where the EPIC FAIL happens. I never get the foot tension right, or the thread tension right for the material I’m using at the moment. I don’t even know what this particular material is called to look it up!

I’m converting a long dress I bought years ago and never wore into a shorter dress and then taking the leftover material and making it into a skirt. It’s a handmade dress so there’s no handy tag to tell me what the material is. The skirt part is mostly done, that was just sew in a “hem” and then threading in some elastic. Fine, no problem. But the material kept getting pulled into the hole where the bobbin thread comes out, the seam is missing like every fifth stitch and isn’t tight/even and I’m pretty sure that’s due to the tension settings. Which I played with a billion times and still didn’t get right.

Shit.

All that crappy sewing didn’t matter so much on the skirt, because the seam is all gathered by elastic so you can’t see how bad it is. But now I want to hem the dress and THAT will be obvious if I fuck it up.

I HATE THIS.

I hate not quite understanding the finer points of the project I’m working on. It’s just how I feel about podcast engineering. I can understand the mechanics of how the equipment works but I can’t seem to grasp the finer points of adjusting stuff like gain and mid-range and shit.

Oh well.

Originally published at Spellwight.