Sewing Machines and Hurricanes, An Odd Couple For Sure

I'm just reporting in (maybe mostly for myself). It is my suspicion that if you don't blog for a while it somehow attracts spam commenters. That suspicion may or may not be logical!

I've kept up with the progress made on my house and even made a little more progress.

I've been sewing again on the weekends and now have 6 or 7 quilt tops that need to be quilted. I'll have some of them done and will try to quilt some of the smaller ones on my machine. My machine was out for a bit because my foot control sort of exploded on me (not a real explosion, it just popped apart and couldn't be put back together because some of the plastic parts had broken). After a period of angst and indecision over what to do, I ordered a foot control. It came in, I excitedly plugged it up. And my machine started "sewing" 90 miles an hour! I wasn't even pressing on the foot control! I discovered there were two different foot controls for this model. I returned the wrong one and ordered the correct one. It seems to be working perfectly well now. I'm happy. And grateful.

I've also been trying to figure out how I could get an old Singer (high school graduation gift from my parents) running again. I brought it to a shop but they said it was the gears that were out and it would cost more than the machine is worth to fix it. I thought that was the end of the line for that machine. Except I googled for information on how to fix the gears. I watched a YouTube video and thought it didn't look that hard. That false certainty led me to try taking my machine apart to see if I thought I could fix it on my own. There were parts I needed to come off that were not coming off. The machine has been setting up for quite a few years. The wheel turned and the needle part went up and down. I almost thought maybe the lady at the shop was wrong. But I can't make it pick up the bobbin thread. I imagine that's where the gear is broken. I also managed to put a needle into the tip of my pointer finger. It didn't go all the way through. That's the first time in all the years I've been sewing that I sewed my finger!

With that failed experience in my head, I remembered another small shop that sells vacuum cleaners and sewing machine. I knew they had a guy there who worked on vacuum cleaners and sewing machines. I called them up and the man on the other end of the line was so enthusiastic about what a great job he could do on fixing my machine and how it most certainly was worth fixing. I'm going to bring it to him when I can. But the skeptic in me wonders if he will really be able to fix it!

People don't fix things anymore. They just throw them out and get new ones, expecting that they will have to buy another replacement in a few years. That's why this machine is worth fixing. It was made to last (in spite of its little plastic gears breaking).

I've been off for three days because of Hurricane Harvey. We had a lot of rain and some uncertainty about the damage he would do here. Our ground was so saturated from all the rain. They were worried about trees falling over in the high winds. All in all, our part of the state dodged a bullet this time around (but I hear there is another storm forming in the Gulf).

However, Harvey did unprecedented damage in the state of Texas. This was one erratic storm. Seeing all the damage and all the displaced people is heartbreaking. We've been driving I-10 back and forth to Houston for many years. I've never seen it as flooded as it was this time around.