Tag: Pfaff

Rolled hem foot

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I love my Pfaff rolled hem foot very much.

Without it I couldn’t have hemmed Karen’s wedding dress without having some kind of a nervous breakdown.

Thanks are also due also to Gabrielle, whose rolled hem foot tutorial helped me to figure out the tricky business of getting the hem started.

The inside layers of the dress were done on the overlocker, as I didn’t fancy trying to do two more rolled hems on very fine jersey. I thought that might be pushing my luck a little bit.

But the dress is finished, I’m never hemming chiffon again (how many times have I said that now?), and I’ve got a week and a half to finish my own dress to wear to the wedding.  That just needs buttons… oh yes, and the hem.

Simple Shirts

I’ve been looking for “interesting” shirt patterns, thinking that I could make lots of plain white shirts with fancy details, and then dress them up with jewellery or waistcoats or (cool) bow ties. The pictures above are about half-and-half patterns that I own already, and ones I’d like to buy.

Except that I’ve bought dozens of patterns for perfectly lovely shirts over the years, and then never made any because my sewing machine hates making buttonholes. I’ve had it looked at, but it works perfectly for Sue at the sewing machine shop. Every time. Stupid thing.

I’ve made precisely four of the shirt patterns that I own, and that includes a pirate shirt and an original 1970s pattern. I altered every single one of them to either replace the buttons with poppers, or to leave the buttons off altogether, but I don’t want to do that with everything I make!

Then there’s the part where I actually own quite a number of shirts already, and I never wear them. They’re always at the bottom of the wardrobe in the ironing pile, so I tend to just throw on a t-shirt instead.

Clearly someone needs to invent a magical button-free, crease-free shirt.

Oh, wait.

That’s a t-shirt.

Ah.

Bobbin Support.

Bobbin support

This is why I’ve been quiet lately – my sewing machine’s been out of action, and I’ve only just got it back!

Before Christmas it had started acting up a bit – the upper thread would get caught in the bobbin mechanism, and I’d have to disentangle it all every few minutes. I mentioned this when I took the machine in for its annual service, and the lovely Sue at Sewmaster told me that they’d replaced the entire bobbin support casing.

I was a bit worried that this would have added quite a lot to the price of the service, but the extra cost of this repair turned out to be a grand total of £3.98. A bargain!

Now to work on a couple of test pieces until the extra oil from the service has worked its way through the machine, and then I can get on with some proper sewing!