I can sew, both by hand and machine. My machines are currently awaiting my husband to hurry up and finish my sewing room, then I’ll take them in to get serviced. You’re supposed to get them serviced every year, but I generally don’t bother to get them done that often. I also have dibs on my mother’s old White sewing machine, which was a treadle machine until it was converted to an electric powered job. No zig-zag, no reverse, just straight stitching…but it sews those straight stitches very well indeed. You don’t have to stop and fiddle with this tension or that doohickey, it just sews.
I can also darn and patch, and I generally will darn and patch on things that don’t show.
I can sew fairly well, but only by hand. My latest project was putting a button fly onto shorts on which the zipper broke. I took fashion design in high school and hand sewed all the outfits that I showed for our yearly fashion show. Sewing by machine would have been easier/faster but I never learned how to use one. A volunteer mom for a tech theatre class in 9th grade taught me how to sew costumes by hand.
I was one of the first class of 8th graders in my hometown in West Virginia who swapped at mid-term - the girls took shop, and the boys uncomfortably took Home Ec.
I never got into cooking. But I became the Go-To guy for fixing the sewing machines. I’ll never forget Mrs. Smith’s advice while I was winding bobbins: “There is nothing more precise than a sewing machine”, which was pretty state-of-the-art for 1973 WV.
I applied for jobs operating/maintaining sewing machines, but never got hired (I was told they were “womens’ jobs”).
It was gratifying to later learn that banjo virtuoso Earl Scruggs worked in a thread factory. Strings, etc.
And in the words of Don Draper: “I can handle a button.”
Sewing was the only way I could have clothes when I was a teenager, and god knows how important clothes are then. But when I started working, time became a big factor, and the last time I priced fabric and patterns, well, sorry, clothing is so damn cheap now, it just didn’t make sense anymore.
My mom has been doing alterations for a living for longer than I’ve been alive.
Her mom can make anything, with or without a pattern. Gran made a killing during the Cabbage Patch Kids craze by making doll clothes and selling them at craft bazaars and garage sales.
My cousin owns a children’s clothing shop, and she makes a lot of the clothes she sells.
My Dad’s mom used to tailor a lot of her clothes before her eyesight went, she’s extremely petite and has trouble buying stuff off the rack.
Me, I got none of those genes. I can sew a button on and sew a simple seam, but that’s about it. Which reminds me, I need to fix my favorite shorts.
The last sewing machine that I used was my grandmother’s converted treadle Singer when I was a teen. It had originally been my great grandmother’s. I learned to quilt from my late SO’s grandmother, but it was hand quilting. I can also do simple mending by hand.
I can embroider or needlepoint like a mofo though.
Don’t usually bother to make my own clothes, or even modify the ones I have, but I certainly can.
These days, my sewing skills are most often used at work, repairing workboots, purses, belts, straps, and today, two horse halters. Of course, the sewing machine I have at work is an industrial type machine, even if it is foot-powered.
My home machine is a working antique, also treadle-powered, that has been used most often to make quilts and soft cases for musical instruments.
Me too. I actually just finished making a pair of curtains* and a valance without a pattern today, and while I could muddle through most things with a pattern I’m not necessarily good at it. I don’t usually make anything more complex than pillow cases and bean or corn bags, but I’m capable of more in a utilitarian sort of way.
*out of this beautiful red-black taffeta I found (a bit like this but the scrolling is red too instead of gold, and there’s black in the taffeta itself… hard to explain, really) and paired with wine red cotton as a backing. I’m really pleased at how prettily they came out.
I chose buttons and hems, but really only buttons. I blame the new sewing machine my mom got about the time I started to get interested in sewing. It was a Singer Golden Touch and Sew, and it had been the floor model. It was so unpredictable. You might have to tear a seam out six times because the bobbin tension would be all over the place, or you might get a perfect seam that was beautiful to behold. When the time came to sell things when mom was gone, my sister and I advertised “free sewing machine with purchase of desk”. I think we got a hundred bucks. I was so glad to see that thing gone!
I can sew a button on and do a very nice, neat hem by hand. I can also sew a passably straight seam on a machine, but I have some sort of mental block when it comes to using a pattern. I just plain cannot understand the instructions - they make me feel the way I do when I read tax forms. I’m also really intimidated by the idea of ruining a bunch of nice fabric. I can mend almost anything by hand, though.
My mother-in-law was a fantastic seamstress. She had two boys, so she used all her pent-up pretty-clothes-making energy on my girls, her only grandchildren. I’ve saved everything she ever sewed for them, and I have two big boxes of adorable dresses and play clothes in whimsical fabrics. She tried to teach me to sew, and I did make a nice skirt under her tutelage, but I never really got the knack. My younger daughter seems to have inherited that facility, though. Now that both her grandmothers are gone, we own four sewing machines, and she’s the only one who really knows how to use them.
This is kind of how my younger daughter sews. She doesn’t have any patience with pre-made patterns, but she’s made some really amazing costumes for herself and her friends with self-made patterns or without any pattern at all. Fine finishing isn’t really her strength, because she doesn’t have the patience to do the fussy little details that really make the difference in the final product.
Our nuclear family inherited a serger from my mother-in-law, but no one knows how to use it. What’s the difference between it and a sewing machine?
That was me in ninth grade! I learned to sew at least a little and how to operate a circular saw and hammer a nail. I ended up with a drawstring bag and a letter holder (a base, an angled upright, and a clothespin glued on top). I think I could have used more than one semester of each class.
A serger has 4 needles and a knife. You run the edge of a piece of fabric through the serger and it sews a neat little pattern of thread and cuts off any excess. It’s not a replacement for a sewing machine but it’s a great way to make utilitarian seams with no fuss. Once you’ve serged your fabric pieces, you can join them with a simple machine stitch and not worry about doing anything about the seam or even run both pieces through the serger at the same time and have it simultaneously join and trim them. Pretty much anything you buy off the rack will have been serged on the inside, even t-shirts.
There is no poll option for my sewing skills: I can mend, hem and sew buttons by hand. I can sew a straight or curved line with my mother’s 1940s cast iron Singer. I have made saddle pad covers for my horse’s saddle pads, assorted craft things like sock monkeys (HEY! waaay cool!) and eyeglass cases. I could probably make something simple from a pattern but I could never tailor it to fit. My mother and her mother were excellent seamstresses–my grandma used to do alterations at Field’s, but neither had the patience to teach me to sew beyond the basics.
My mother taught me to sew on an ancient 1950s vintage Singer, my grandmother taught me to do classic needlework [I can do anything from padded white on white to cutwork, to bargello and crewel to pretty much any form of embroidery though I hate smocking] and I have done “sheep to shawl” events starting from mrAru shearing our sheep. Although I use a drop spindle, not a spinning wheel. I can do lucet cording, and find it easier to make medieval and renaissance clothing by hand than on a machine, and am currently working on making a Roman Vestal Virgin ‘costume’ [it will be real wearable functional clothing, not something that looks mostly correct - it will be made a close to original as I can do without actually spinning and weaving the wool and linen myself, though I have made clothing where I spun and wove the wool and dyed it myself.] Though I admit, even though myhair is long enough, I am making a wig.
If a machine does only one thing, it will usually do that one thing very well, if it’s well made. Each additional task a machine has to perform increases the chance of something going wrong. This is why I love great grandma’s old straight stitch only sewing machine…if all you need is a straight stitch, then that machine will sew it without giving any problems.
One thing about a serged seam…once it’s been serged, you can forget about ripping out the seam if you messed it up. However, a serger can do things that a regular sewing machine can’t do, or can’t do easily. My mother had a serger (which I have inherited), and I think that she used it mostly for finishing fabric edges. I haven’t used it yet.
Oh, you can but it will take you ages with a seam ripper and if the fabric isn’t very sturdy, it will look like shit. (But yes, conventional wisdom says you only get one go at serging something.)
Yeah, I’ve ripped a few serged seams, but since the serging cuts off the excess fabric, it’s damn near impossible to sew again, even if the fabric is sturdy. If I do get that serger serviced and start using it, I’ll probably use it mostly to finish edges at first. Back when I sewed a lot of my own clothes, I actually used that lace seam binding for a lot of edges, especially when I was hemming. I’d sew the seam binding to the edge of the hem by machine, and then invisibly hem by hand.
I can sew, though I don’t do much of it- it’s something I keep meaning to get back into. I can generally follow a pattern, and I have made my own patterns once or twice- I’m an odd shape, so standard patterns don’t fit anything better than shop made stuff does, so it would be worth me doing it more.
I have an aged Singer (from 1940- I have the reciept) (just straight up stitches, nothin’ fancy), but I tend to just hand-sew things, even to the extent of hand sewing a top.
