My Poor Machine

My daughter decided on Friday that she was really going to help Mommie work. Well, let's just say, she is NOT a perfect helper. In fact, quite the opposite. Wanting to sit on Mommie's lap and a pair of fast little hands to my sewing machine and, presto, something went haywire.

I spent a long time over the weekend trying to assess the damage and figure out why the upper thread was no longer catching in the bobbin casing. I thought it was a lost cause. I got my old mechanical 10 stitch machine out of the closet and revved it up hoping thinking that I could just use that to finish my work until I could fix my good machine.

Hmm, no such luck. I am missing important stitches that I have come to rely on with my fancier, computerized sewing machine, and I forgot how much a mechanical one clanks around. It made too much noise to work at night. Big problem, when a majority of my sewing is done after bedtime.

I took another crack at servicing my good machine and thought I had actually fixed it. I put it back on my table, loaded on my thread, did a practice run, everything looked great. I begin to get back to work and very shortly after I found that everything was going haywire AGAIN.

I fiddled around with it some more and got it going okay for a few minutes, sewing VERY VERY slowly. No good. I might as well have been stitching by hand. This was just going to take too long and I can't risk this machine freaking out and eating one of my custom orders or something.

So I had to take it back off the table, email everyone I could think of that I am working on things for or are lined up to do work for to let them know I hit a snag, and then start searching out a new sewing machine.

I need to decide quickly what I am going to buy as I need it like yesterday. I was thinking that if I am going to get a new machine anyway, I might as well upgrade to something I have been looking at that also does embroidery. I'd like to try my hand at that, at least for things for my family. However, the cost seems a bit prohibitive. I can't decide if it is smarter to just buy a sewing machine to replace this broken one for the moment and buy a combo later when I have saved up for it, or if I should just try to splurge now and get the combo upgrade. Decisions, decisions...

Well, I have to make up my mind by tomorrow as I am really falling behind on everything on my list of things to sew, so I guess I will be updating again later with the outcome of my dilemma!