It is Friday and Friday's are for fun. I guess I could have used "How I spent the first day of 2009" as a title for this post but it is too many words for a title and I always wanted to use the word hell in a blog post title.
My darling daughter returned to the US last fall. She is living in an apartment near the University of Minnesota where she is completing her PhD and teaching. She needed curtains. We tired curtain shopping but ended up wearing each other out. She described what she wanted, we found some material and I spent New Years day making them. I have not touched a sewing machine in a couple of years.
The machine in the picture is a serger. It is very fast and will sew and finish a seam in one step. It only does one thing so I had to use a regular sewing machine too. I had forgotten why I don't sew any more until I discovered that the serger needed to be threaded. The machine should come with a warning label on it that says DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. The blue and orange lines are easy enough to thread but the red and green are cruel and unusual punishment.
More complicated than . . . it is complicated. It takes both manual dexterity and athletic ability to thread one of these babies. The instructions are complicated, convoluted and condescending. Not to mention hard to follow. There must be a special school for instructions writers and who knows maybe a special place in hell for the bad ones too.
Once the four spools of thread have been threaded through the machine the needles need to be threaded and the little knobs on the right side, not shown in the picture need to be set just so. It came with a video but I couldn't watch the whole thing because it did not have much of a plot. I guess it had a happy ending but I will never know for sure.
Some how I did it and made the curtains. For three windows it took 4 or 5 hours not including the 45 minutes it took to thread the serger. It would be nice to know who designed the machine. I think I would thank him or her. If I ever meet the &^%$#!! who wrote the instructions for it my words would not be so kind.
At the risk of sounding like one of those pushy Realtors I have to say that if there had been more home buying and selling activity in St. Paul last week I wouldn't have had time to make curtains for the professor. This week has been much busier, and I am truly thankful for that.
Have a Great weekend and please don't give me time to play with the serger.
Twitter
Flickr
LinkedIn
Facebook
RSS
Posterous
Email
FourSquare
Yelp
SlideShare
I applaud you. For I would have NEVER been able to re-thread that machine! Or sew curtains for that matter
Ricardo – I am quite the dinosaur. There are not many who know how to make anything except maybe web sites and photographs.
It’s a love hate relationship with sergers. I feel your pain. Once I get it threaded that color stays on there until it runs out!
I’m doing good to get my regular sewing machine threaded (even with the “auto” needle threading thing). Maybe by the time my daughter is in grad school I’ll get the fabric (curtains) off of the wall where it is hanging and finish them. Congrats! You really need to show us the final product, though!
ROTFL! You forgot to mention the 8 inch long tweezers that comes with the machine for the purpose of rethreading those blasted red and green threads! Instructions? I wouldn’t describe them as instructions!