20 years

Meet Kenmore 10.  This is the machine my mom taught me to sew on, and besides a brief foray into pillow making in 7th grade home ec, the machine I spent all of my formative sewing years using.

I did use my college roommate's sewing machine, the last couple years of my undergrad.  I don't remember what kind it was, but it wasn't the same machine.  That was when I learned how to read and use sewing patterns.  Jeanie and I sewed at home, too, making quilts for our brothers, and our mom.  Jeanie also made me a quilt, which I have since taken the ties out of, and am in the midst of hand quilting.  But I digress.

After I graduated from college the last time, I moved back into my parent's house, and spent a large part of that first summer sewing on the machine.  So, a year later, about when I was moving out right before I got married, my mom asked me if I wanted to keep it.  I of course said yes.  She gave me all the little fiddly bits that go with the machine, like a brush to clean off lint and different presser feet.

And she gave me the instruction manual.  I didn't look at that for a couple years.  And why would I?  I had been sewing on the machine since I was a kid.

About a year ago, I finally looked at the instruction manual.  I don't remember why I did, but I found some cool things I could do, different stitches that I could use, and that was pretty nifty.

Then a couple days ago, my machine kept on producing a garbled mess of thread on the underside of what I was sewing.  It had been having problems recently, but usually it would fix itself if I tried a seam again.  This time, no such luck, so I pulled out the instruction manual.  I figured out it was probably the bobbin tension that was the problem.  And across the page where it talks about adjusting the bobbin tension, my mom had drawn a line and written "Bobbin is set in factory.  Do not mess with it!!!"

I knew my mom had taken a class on her sewing machine when she got it, and I had always guessed that the notes in my manual was insight she gained at that class.  Going against such wisdom was not something I wanted to do I on my own.  So I turned to my mother-in-law, Vickie, for help.

Vickie adjusted the bobbin for me, and told me to try it out.  In the mean time, she went off to work on some laundry.  I tried sewing again, but the tension was still off, despite anything I did to the top tension.  So, I fiddled with the bobbin myself.  I tried anything else I could think of.  Nothing seemed to help.  Finally I got Vickie back, and she looked at what I'd done and gave me a lecture on how springs need time to adjust, and fixed the problem while I wallowed in pity as to what my life would be like without my sewing machine.

During my efforts to figure out what was wrong, why nothing seemed to work, I finally read the section on how to thread the machine.

Turns out I've been doing it wrong.  My mom first taught me how to use the sewing machine about 20 years ago.  It was probably another 5 before I really started using it, and she would thread it for me and my sister for a while.  But eventually I started doing it on my own, maybe 10 or so years ago.  And I've been doing it wrong.