All About Cardboard!

Was going to share a gazillion photos of my shopping exploits in Singapore today but this came in my mailbox.

Look at the spine:

Cardboard crafts!!!

By me!!!!

I've been waiting for months to see this in print. The team at Family Fun wrote to me about adapting that old blog post about working with cardboard - the one that's in my sidebar -, and it was a dream assignment, not to mention an incredible honor. I get to spread cardboard love nationally! I hope it's contagious! Cardboard gone viral would be uber coooool. 

How Well Do You Know Your Sewing Machine?

A whole lot better than I do mine, I'll bet.

Recent conversations -phone and in person - with Mum and Dad all turn, at some point, to procuring an industrial machine and the frustrations of sewing our more interesting projects on home machines. Not actually being in Singapore when Dad does his sewing, I am only as aware of how well he and his (home) machine are getting on as Mum will report. Delightful nuggets like "someone flipped the switch on the pedal so it was extra slow and we panicked because we thought the machine was going to conk" and "we didn't like the zipper foot so we unscrewed it and transplanted the old one from the treadle machine" liberally sprinkle our exchanges about children, school, weather, Korean TV serial plots and the prices of baby back ribs and pho. Fun. 

This morning we were talking about the joys of shoving gummy layers of neoprene under the presser foot of a typical home machine when Mum suddenly remembered that she and Dad had recently discovered a secret lever on their own machine that lent a whole new dimension of ease to bulky fabrics. So great was her enthusiasm that even I, apathetic seamstress-still-mentally-on-vacation, was spurred on to investigate my own machine in the hopes of finding this same Wonder Thingamajig therein. How came she about this fantastic revelation? I muttered into the receiver, my head wedged under the horizontal arm of my Pfaff 1525, nose dangerously close to getting impaled on the needle.

"We finally found our sewing machine manual!" she brightly confided. 

Ah, the manual. 

"Maybe your manual will tell you where to find yours!" she continued. "We found out from ours that our machine can do so much more!"

Extracted my head and stood upright long enough to (bitterly) explain that my useless manual contained overlapping instructions to operate three different models, with all the most exciting features accompanied by the disclaimer, "*Not found in model 1525". 

"I've given up reading the manual, Mum. It was too depressing." I finally concluded my tirade. 

"Tsk," said Mum, sympathetically. "These people should..."

"Those people", however, were liberated from whatever obligation Mum had designed for them, because right then, I discovered The Lever.

Hurrah!

Although, more accurately, it wasn't actually a new lever. It was the same singular lever that had raised and lowered the presser foot for years but which had a mid-position lock that I'd never noticed before. Here, I'll show you:

This is my presser foot mechanism, with the black walking foot behind it.

Here it is in the raised, lowered, and (newly discovered) middle position:

This middle setting of the presser foot, achieved on my machine, by clicking the lever sideways into a little catch, instead of up-and-down, allows the presser foot to remain suspended above the plate while sewing. 


"Does it work?" asked Mum.
"I dunno. The machine isn't plugged in." I said.
"Why not?" asked Mum.
"Because I'm still on vacation."

Speaking of presser feet, I discovered something else new about my machine. Like many other newfangled machines, mine came with snap-on feet, and for years I never thought to try any other kind of feet on them. The trouble with the specialized snap-on Pfaff feet is they are very expensive, and very unavailable, except from dealers (sneaky). So I got by with using just the feet that came free with the machine, and using cunning techniques to impersonate new and exciting feet I needed e.g. scotch tape (teflon foot), strategic fingernail gliding (piping foot) and sheer brute force (roller foot).

When I met up with Jen on this trip to Singapore, I bemoaned this to her, and she suggested unscrewing the whole blooming foot shank thingy and replacing it with cheaper, generic feet. Brilliant (her)! And dim (me)! Couldn't wait to get home and try it. Mentioned this to Mum on the phone in this morning's conversation and she said, "Oh, Dad's been doing it all along." 

Hrmph. My parents are keeping all the best sewing secrets from me, I swear.


Anyway, so I carried out Experiment #2 - The Foot Transplant. 

Unscrewed and removed the entire foot shank of my Pfaff,

leaving only the bare whatchamacallit,

poached a presser foot from the old spare Singer I keep around for emergencies:

and grafted that on. 

Snap-on schmap-on. Pschffffft.

True, the walking foot (black thing behind the regular presser foot) cannot engage with these parasite feet, which might mean compromised workmanship with the more demanding materials like neoprene and vinyl, but at least it's an option. And something to experiment with, certainly, while incubating all my research on industrial machines. 

So that's my lesson today. What new and humiliating things have you learnt about your sewing machine lately?  

P.S. Happy Valentine's Day, y'all. I ate extra chocolate today to celebrate; "extra" meaning "while ignoring the treadmill."

Home and Coveting

We're home.

Ah.

I'm still wearing shorts, because although it's 18F-ish outside, my brain thinks the sunshine streaming in through the deck door is 91F sunshine, like the Equator sunshine we left just 48 hours ago.

This is one of my favorite beaches. And here is Grandma playing with the girls in the sand.

Zooming out even more - Mum, Dad and me hanging out in the shade,

where, in spite of the shadow, it is still sunny.

The beach(es) - we went to three different ones - were the #2 most-visited place on this trip.

#1 was the pool. 

This is the same public swimming complex at which I swam as a younger person, until I discovered the more private swimming clubs. There are four pools - two Olympic sized (although only one was Olympic-depth; the other was a mid-depth training pool) and two wading/teaching pools for kids:

Years ago, I used to spend all my time in the Olympic pools, doing laps. But on this trip, I spent all my time in the kiddie pool.

How the kids loved it! We swam six days out of twelve. Here in MN the only chance the kids get to be in pools is when they have swimming lessons. Indoor heated pools crowded with other kids and swimming instructors are sooooooooooo not fun. In this Singapore pool, the girls goofed around and experimented with their strokes in an environment as warm as bathwater (I kid you not), and by the end of the six visits, swam better than they ever had in swimming class.

How could they not? Swimming pools under the tropical sun are magic. They make a person sane like sewing never could. Emily asked me, "Mum, are there any pools like this in MN where you can just swim whenever you want for fun without having swimming lessons?" Apart from water parks? I've been asking that same question since I first got here. 

One more photo before we return to the business of the day - here are Kate and Nikhi, Jen's little girl. Yes!! That  Jen! We finally had a playdate of sorts, as if we were regular, normal mom-friends. It was fun to pretend that we still lived in the same country. Incidentally, none of those clothes were sewn by either of us. We support store-bought!!!!!

So now we're home - gorgeously tanned but dreadfully disoriented. The kids have been up at 1am/3am/5am the past two nights(? mornings?). Last night/this morning, Emily read a novel and did Math homework at 3 am in her room because she was so wide awake. Kate has been wandering about the house in the darkness, trying to sleep in various beds. I think Dave and I would've been over our jet lag by now were we not sabotaged by the children coming to visit us at unearthly hours with whispers and daft questions like "Are you awake?" (Darn it, we weren't, till you made us think about it. Grrrr.) 

And then yesterday afternoon, when I called the kids to lunch, Jenna asked me, "Mum, is this lunch or supper?" Poor kids - eating too many meals on the plane with the sun shining at hours that don't agree with our watches has done us in. Ugh, coming home (to MN, I mean) is hard. Saying goodbye to family and sunshine aside, traveling between the two worlds I call home, only one of which has decent curry, is an assault on the system in so many ways.

I'm coping the only way I know how - by shopping for large, expensive, non-mainstream items like these:

They're all lockstitch industrial sewing machines. I've wanted one of these since I was a teenager, sewing custom bags and specialty musical instrument cases and struggling with their thick, bulky unwieldiness. The obvious benefits of an industrial machine - its long arm, greater power, higher allowance, needle feed, just to name a few - would've made such a difference even back then. 

That first photo on the top left is of my Aim-For-In-The-Cheap*-Category machine. It's a Pfaff, and it will nicely match my other two Pfaffs (the home machine and the serger). It's $2K++, which is cheap* for a Pfaff. And it sews leather and other medium-to-heavyweights. And has a walking foot. But still.... $2000..... 

So I'm trying to be a bit frugal (hahahahahahahaha) and look at other brands. That Juki on the bottom right is a lightweight apparel sewing machine. It's cheap, like cheaper than even my Pfaff home sewing machine, but it doesn't sew vinyl and other materials of that category.

While in Singapore, I've been learning about these workhorses. Behold:

Do you see it? Here, I'll circle it for you:

See? Industrial sewing machine!!!!

Let me tell you a bit about these alteration tailors. Many people in Singapore live in apartments, and these apartments are grouped into small, compact neighborhoods with shared amenities like a market, an al fresco food court called a hawker center, a supermarket, sports facilities and dozens of miscellaneous stores that provide a mind-boggling array of anything from optometric services and photo developing to baked goods, traditional medicine, lingerie and stationery. Within the markets themselves are similar shops - and in the market near Mum's apartment building (i.e. my childhood home), I counted no fewer than three such alteration tailors (excluding the men's tailor, whose shop  -which is between the watch repair shop and the shop selling fresh fruit and joss-paper - is stacked with bales/bolts of suiting fabric). I've never patronized any of these because we did all our own sewing, but there they sit, these illustrious ladies -and man-, sewing for other people. They all have industrial sewing machines - nobody uses one of those ubiquitous white plastic home Singers, Janomes, Vikings or Berninas. 

But I digress. The ones used by these alterations tailors are probably lightweight apparel machines or industrial overlockers and therefore not the sort I am looking for, since I can easily sew clothes, upholstery and drapes on my home Pfaff. Also, I've learnt that industrial machines are very task-specific: they often do just one stitch - either a straight stitch (aka lockstitch) , or a zig-zag stitch, or bartack, or overlocking, or chain stitch. I need a medium-weight straight-stitch flat-bed thing that can take vinyl and leather. Last Christmas I decided I'd buy myself one large, extravagant electrical gift -either a stand mixer or one of these babies. Chickened out and bought a stand mixer because it took up less room and cost far less. I've been enjoying my mixer, and it's been feeding my family, but it doesn't get me all excited like an industrial sewing machine does. Sigh. I don't know anything else that I've coveted for so long but haven't yet bought for myself. 

The four machines in the photos above are all new, incidentally. I am probably ultimately getting a used one because it's just more cost-effective. But it's easier to do objective research on the brand-new ones at dealer sites, to compare features and check out relative prices before looking on ebay or wherever for deals. Which brings me to you guys - thank you all for the suggestions in the comments to that post in which I first mentioned these machines. But I need more! More! Tell me of your experiences with yours (if you own one), where to buy one, where I can go to try one out, what to look for when choosing one, what a good price would be for a used one, what models are great and which are duds, anything! I appreciate all the help you can give me!

Out With The Girls

I mean the grown-up girlfriends, not the kids.

Fun day out with two friends today. Both I've known since we were little ourselves. You guys know them! The first is Eunice, she-who-used-to-love-cows-and-now-shares-her-heart-with-also-hedgehogs-and-owls. I make her crazy birthday gifts like these and this and this. We went shopping at Daiso -where I bought stuff like a pill cutter (it removes the pilly fuzzy bits from fabric surfaces; it doesn't cut medicine tablets in half) and had dim sum at a fabulous Cantonese restaurant. The noodles! The porridge! Oh, how I've missed real Chinese food. And the good company. So much fun to catch up.

Then we said goodbye (till next year) and I zoomed off on the train to meet Jen. Sans kids! We're older now, but we're still meeting in malls like we did back when we were - what - 11? 13? Except now we both had to fly/drive in from our new respective countries to do it. We went sewing shopping, naturally. Not to browse - we both had specific things to buy, and specific stores at which to get them. We went to Spotlight and I gawked at how velcro costs S$10 (about US$7) a yard when it's 99c in JoAnn. Then we went to the haberdashery wholesale stores in Textile Centre, where velcro costs S$2 a yard and comes in every color of the rainbow, and then some, including raspberry and peacock. Stocked up on sewing machine needles, invisible zippers, polka-dot bias tape, tailor's chalk and trims, but no fabric. Hurrah! Very good self-control, no? And Jen and I got to talk about interfacing and interlining and industrial machines and commercial patterns and children and life and it wasn't enough but it would have to do till we meet again.

And then it was home to the family and the kids were pleased to have me back. "Mummy likes me!" said Kate, and kissed my arm. And all three children fought to hold both my hands. Silly, precious girls. 

I have no photos because I didn't bring the camera with me. But I wanted to write this post anyway also to say how odd it is being back in my home country when it isn't my home country anymore. Those of you with feet in two (or more) cultures separated by geographical boundaries will probably relate. It is effortless to slip back into my Singaporean identity and spew words in the colloquial tongue, plus various Chinese dialects, and it is also effortless to slip back into my minivan back in the US, and begin to roll my "r"s in the American way, and cook meatloaf. I am both Singaporean and American now. But it is also simultaneously bizarre to stand on the train on the way to meet friends, as I did this morning, and have this thought suddenly hit you: "I personally know thousands of people in this country - family, ex-students, friends, colleagues - and my toiletries are in a ziploc bag, while in the land where my shower foam sits permanently on the shelf of my bathroom, I know fewer than 50." Not a sad thought at all, just weird. 

And here's another one: I can recall two kinds of phone numbers - yes, just from memory - the 8-digit Singapore ones and the 10-digit US ones, prefixed with the 952 or 612 area code. Both are completely natural to me, because my brain is compartmentalized into two distinct modes with parallel familiar experiences and that same brain is on hyperdrive, comparing and contrasting every single thing through the filters of culture. My two worlds have very little in common- especially if one looks beyond the common language- with the exception of sewing. I sew in both cultures, and apart from the voltage needed to run the respective sewing machines, all my equipment and tools are the same, down to the brand and shape of the bobbins. I've often suspected there was more to sewing for me than it being a creative outlet. Clearly I don't do it for sanity, the way some of you do. I am never sane when I sew - you all know that! But it reminds me of home here when I sew in Minnesota, and it reminds me of home in the US when I go shopping for haberdashery here in Singapore. I think it's weirdly wonderful, but isn't it also just absolutely schizophrenic? 

One-sided zippers

Some photos of the super-simple cordura pouches Dad made for his archery equipment. These little pouches -they're about 9" long - are the free gifts his clients get when they order a custom-made bow case from him.

Completely lined and padded, they unzip flat.

The zipper is one continuous piece of zipper tape, not two halves.

Here's a shot of the end of the zipper, which is actually the middle of the zipper tape.

Couldn't be bothered to do a photographic step-by-step, since I'm on vacation after all, but here are some text instructions instead.

1. Cut the length of zipper tape you need (perimeter of the pouch plus about 2" allowance). We like zipper tape by the foot - the sort for which you have to buy separate zipper pulls that fit it. If you are using an actual, complete zipper, remove and discard the zipper stop at the end, and slide the zipper pull out.
2. Separate the zipper tape into two halves and put away one of the halves.
3. Leaving about 1" end allowance, sew the zipper to the edge of the thing (the pouch, in this case) to which you want to attach it. Sew all the way around till you reach the point where you started, leaving the other 1" end allowance. 
4. Close the pouch so the two 1" ends meet, slip the zipper pull back over the two ends, and zip the pouch up.

And that's how Dad does his zippers. You've probably seen them on things like those continuous-zipper bags and zip-up-able coin pouches, right? I have too, but I never thought to make regular pouches the same way, a classic "why didn't I think of that?" example of how I've just done things one sad way all my life when there were other, better ways to do them. Sort of like the smoooooooth waistbands on pants and skirts that have revolutionized the way I sew children's bottom garments. Duh.

Not related: Dad and I are thinking seriously of finally getting our industrial sewing machines. So we can sew more, of course, but also so we can sew more of the stuff that is tricky on home sewing machines, because of the size of the projects that makes them unwieldy, and the layers of nylon and packcloth and padding. Now it's a sort of race to see which of us will buy one first. I suspect Dad will, since he's actually selling stuff that requires one, whereas I'm just producing stuffed animals and wimpy totes and toys and random amateurish children's clothes and maybe the occasional neoprene thing. Must start doing my research. Anyone got an industrial machine to recommend? I need mine to do a good straight stitch, is all.   

My Father Sews Zippers Better Than I Do

Shh... we're here in Singapore, and yes, we've been to the beach and some of us are sunburnt, and today we went swimming till the rain came, but this post is not about that.

My Dad showed me his sewing projects, see. Little cordura zippered pouches for archery equipment. His zipper work is stunning. I have to take pictures and blog them when I get home. He uses one side of the zipper tape. Just one half. Per pouch. So each zipper he buys makes two pouches. Incredibly neat, because there aren't the little zipper tails to deal with, or zipper stops, either. So clever. I feel somewhat inferior, looking at my own bags. 

Housekeeping While I'm On the Beach

Well, I'm not on the beach... yet. We're probably still on the plane right now. It's a 22+ hour flight, with just one stopover - for about an hour - in Japan. This is as direct a flight as it gets between the snow and the sunshine. Every time we fly, the husband and I seriously consider flights with a few more stopovers, just so we don't land in Singapore at 1 am. And we always fantasize about flying through Europe or San Fransisco, and catching the Singapore Airlines flight into its home airport. But we always revert to our old, boring Delta direct-flight choice: with little kids, shorter is better, even if it means 15 hours at a stretch. We think going stark raving bonkers confined in an airplane is still much better than going stark raving bonkers lugging ALL our check-in luggage+three kids+their small animal friends all over several other airports as we change planes and re-greet customs officers, force-emptying our water bottles as we go.

Think good thoughts for us as we fly! We have Sharpies! We are invincible! 

I just wanted to get this post out about some housekeeping matters while I'm away.

1 The etsy shop

is closed till we get back. Not that there's a lot in there usually, anyway. You can still convo me about things you like, because I will have internet access where I am. Almost all the ribbon ball kits have been sold, save two (Savanna and Mod Orange), so if you're still thinking of a kit, you can think about those, or I can put a kit together in the colors you might want when I get back.

2 The pattern store

stays open, since the hosting site emails out download links automatically upon receiving payment from you. I don't manually need to send anything out to you, unless you run into download difficulties, which brings me to my plea:

Please, please, please, avoid using Internet Explorer, if you plan to buy a pattern while I'm away. Firefox and Google Chrome are better bets, because IE almost always crashes with these big files. Also, please don't be daft and try and check the download link while you're on your work computer or your iPhone or iPad when you actually want it saved to your computer at home. The file downloads immediately to whichever device you are on. While I have internet access and possibly access to my pattern files remotely, I can't guarantee that I can get them to you by email attachment the way I can when I'm in my own house at my own computer. This means you could be left for two weeks with no pattern and having paypal-ed me your money. I apologize in advance if this happens to you, but I've left this same disclaimer on the page from which you purchase the patterns, so you might be reminded before you click "buy". 

3 Autoposts

(other than this one) will not be happening! I am on vacation. And by "vacation", I mean "I am on vacation". I'll miss you guys, but not enough to want to give the impression that I'm still here when I'm elsewhere. I'm going to be away from my sewing machine (hurrah!) and Mum (bless her) says she collected some neighbor's moving boxes so I may do some cardboarding in Singapore. Maybe if I feel like it, I might even pop in to share some real-time exciting seamstressing from the get-togethers with Auntie Laura, Mum, Dad (sorry - seamster) and Jen and the various other sewing relatives, but, otherwise, things will be quiet around here. See you when we touch down here again!