Home ec

When I was in High School only the young ladies did "home ec." I was a "motor head," one of those kids whose talents lay more toward fiddling with things than with sitting at a desk learning facts. The fact is I was a terrible student who hated being in a classroom from the first day my Mother dropped me off at Kindergarten. (At least that's the story she tells; and my subsequent years of school experience certainly support her claim!) I did all the "shops," wood, metal, electrical and drafting. But I didn't do home ec.

The decades scrolled by and I put my hands to a lot of machines using a lot of tools, metal fabrication, fiberglass molding; aircraft, motorcycle, and auto repair; house remodeling, AC and DC wiring, some of whose basics I learned back in my high school shops classes. But I didn't do home ec. Which means I never tried to make anything out of fabric or cloth...which means I never worked on a sewing machine...until now.

Now Nomad's Bimini frame is set up and pretty much fills a spare bedroom. Deb has supervised us laying out the plastic sheet used to make patterns, and those patterns have been used to cut yards of fabric. Fabric not needed for the Bimini cover has been sacrificed on the alter of an Ultrafeed Model LSZ-1 Sialrite as I try to master the art of sewing. I finally made it to home ec. And I have to say, it has been a long time since I climbed a learning curve this steep!

One would think someone who has laid out and shot countless rows of rivets within tolerances of a couple of hundredths of an inch, would be able to sew a straight line. But one would be wrong. The lines aren't straight, hell, the individual stitches IN the line aren't straight. How did I manage that?

So far my foot seems capable of finding just two throttle settings. One gets the machine making that straining humming noise that motors make when they don't have quite enough juice to turn. The other is wide open with thread, needles and fabric seemingly flying off in all directions. Running the bobbin dry and having to fill another can stop proceedings long enough to finish a Rum & Coke and I am magic at breaking the thread. Re-threading the machine from scratch can twist my brain into a hurt and if you don't get it exactly right, nasty things happen to what is supposed to be a "stitch." Then (of course) the thread breaks again. For added fun there is this thing called "binding." Binding is when you take a thin piece of fabric, fold it around the edge of another piece of fabric, (or two, or three) and stitch the whole mess together into an attractive finished edge. Sailrite has a fancy little swng-out bit that feeds binding material into the presser foot in a continuous stream. Even with that I managed to 1) run the binding off the edge, sewing it neatly together but missing the base fabric entirely then 2) actually folding the base material so that it leaked out from under the binding in an ever growing triangle. And that with a fancy tool that is supposed to make the whole thing "easy."

I have to admit though, it is a huge amount of fun trying to figure it out. Deb is a patient instructor and I'm sure I'll get the hang of it. Like everything else, mostly it just takes practice. Cutting fabric is a sight easier than cutting 2024T-3 and though I haven't managed a straight line yet, one can put in 1000 stitches in the time it takes to drill, burr and shoot 10 rivets. Maybe with a couple of thousand more I'll figure out how to make them straight?

In any case we don't know what the schedule will be for making the lake this weekend, if we make it at all. The Bimini has to get finished, and not just because I hate to have projects unfinished but not being worked on. It will be nearly 100 degrees around here this weekend. Without a Bimini? Ouch. And with the heat will be TRWs. The only way we could get the frame home was to feed it into the Saturn with the legs sticking up out of the trunk and the open passenger side window. Not only is it a weird looking thing going down the road, but running in rain would be a bad idea.