My mother was a seamstress and I’ve been sewing since I was a teenager. This led to me leave Winnipeg in order to study fashion design in Toronto many moons ago. Which then led to me ditching my fashion career after five years working in the biz. And to cut a long story short… that’s how I ended up here!

Some of you long-time readers may recall my ill-fated attempt to start up an online clothing store back in 2006, featuring all linen natural clothing (I still have whacks of stock in my storage room if anyone is interested…). And perhaps because of that my interest in making my own clothes waned.

Anyhow… one of the many downsides of being FAT is that there aren’t many nice clothes around for big girls. Yes, I know… so lose weight! Trust me, been working on that, and it hasn’t been easy. Anyhow! With summer coming up I decided I wanted to have a few nice things to wear and dragged out my old trusty Singer (which you can see above with its top partly off). I bought this when I first moved to Sevilla in 1993 and it has served me well. But to be honest, I haven’t used it in years, except for the occasional “repair job”.

The other day I took it out in order to “re-purpose” an old dress and turn it into a summer skirt. Everything was going well until this morning when I needed to put more thread on the bobbin. And the fucking bobbin spindle refused to turn! As you can see, I took the thing apart, but couldn’t find the source of the problem. So then I got online to see how much a new machine would cost. But then I went back to the old beast… and it looks like if I replace the rubber O ring under the spindle it should work again. I’ve also been taking sewing machines apart since I was a teenager.

So… what to do? I’ve been putting off taking out the old overlock machine I bought a million years ago back in Toronto. Yes, it did make it overseas (a friend brought it on a flight to the UK as hand luggage). Back then those machines cost a fortune (my old Juki cost 1,000 dollars), and also weighed a ton. Now online I see them for about 250 euros.

Would having new machines inspire me to design and sew again? I think they might, especially as the new ones are much lighter. I can barely lift the ones I have now. Also, my Juki has always been temperamental with thread tension, so we’ve always had a kind of love-hate thing going on there. But to be honest, I’ve always had a love-hate thing going on with sewing itself. I mean, I love the results, and I’m actually very good at it, but man, sometimes I look at things I have made and think “I remember EVERY seam!”. And not in a good way. 😉 I also see EVERY flaw, every time I went a bit wibbly. So not sure what to do. Meanwhile, something SHOULD be done with the hundreds of metres of Italian linen that are also in my storage room. Any takers?