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This Blog is a personal record and an honest illustration of my life as a full time embroidery artist. I hope that you find it entertaining and inspiring.

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Saturday 16 April 2011

Snap bloody snap snap.....

Oh no!!!!!

My new super dooper industrial trooper ..... GETS ON MY NERVES!
Never mind smashing Cava against her engine and celebrating her name and maiden voyage......

I am absolutely tired tonight after a day of intense work.
The thread snapped SO MANY sodding times with or without fiddly tension business ...
(Gosh ... this blog will never sound exciting to anyone other than ladies interested in Stitch as long as I go on about sodding thread tension.)

Jeez how boring.
AND how boring is snapping thread when all you want to do is get on with the task at hand efficiently and fast.  I have no time for mistakes and decisions have to be made by the flying seat of my pants at the moment.  I am doing a big new piece of work and I only have a week to schedule.  It is meant to be fast and furious and hard and edgy but its DOING MY HEAD IN :/

I feel a bit of a tit really as I didn't realise that you not only have to thread the sodding needle every time the thread breaks but also the uppy downy lever thing at the front of the machine.
(Technical terms always.)

You cant just slide the thread in and get on with with it, you have to cut the thread and thread it through a damn hole here there and everywhere and its bloody irritating to bloody SAY THE LEAST!

MISTAKE - When I tried it for a test ride... it had been threaded up for me..... theres a lesson there....

Apart from bringing my knees together which I suppose is a good thing (?) I am actually leaning over a whole lot more as the action on the table is lower and you become more 'hunched' ... even more like an old dear with a back problem.

I want to go out dancing with a delicious tall man who buys me dainty but powerful cocktails and canapes in some fabulous bar on a swinging Friday night BUT ...INSTEAD...... I am licking bits of thread like some obsessed fruitcake willing the machine to be nice to me and sew for longer than half a bloody centimeter in an old mill in Manchester!

Despite a careful, patient and steady start on my new tractor style stitching massive ... the thread
KEEPS ON SNAPPING and I am there snipping and licking and fiddling and fucking about with this stupid annoying long and sinuous stuff that quite frankly GETS ON MY NERVES... continuous, relentless, irritating, repetitive, testing  finickerty.  It is rare that you can get up speed and sew ... When you do its like WOOHOO here we go come on Woop yeah faster woo lets go yeah come on and....


SNAP!

AGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have concentrated so hard all day and am doing a problematic and challenging piece of work which is 1m square.  You don't seem to be able to fit in as much canvas as on a domestic 1008 and I am wrestling even more with the bloody artwork so that by the end of the day my shoulders are dead and I am exhausted and pissed off.  The bobbin has a spontaneous perm in its own shell.... It runs out before you have had chance to get going and there is no thread tension.  It seems to run out of the  machine with no self control whatsoever so you end up wasting loads of  thread and having these long trails getting caught in everything before you start stitching which you continuously have to trim.

I will give it another 2 days ......
I am aware that sometimes you need to get used to something but I have worked on the machine for a long old time so I know what I need.  You just do.  When you get going it can go bloody fast and has an amazing smoothness about it but theres too much faff in between.

IF it was set up like a domestic but with a flat bed table , Rolls Royce engine, had a light, was quick to thread and the mod cons then yes ... It would be brilliant but it isn't .. it has old fashioned components,  no light and doesn't agree with machine embroidery thread.

So, I either start making jeans, set up a one man band sweat shop or I need to speak to my favourite sewing machine Man and see if I can take the damn thing back.

What a total arse.

Hello!? WHY NOT GET A WOMAN IN TO HELP DESIGN A NEW MACHINE!!!!!!!!!!!

BIGGER BOBBINS  and More room for fabric ???




9 comments:

  1. With you all the way - GRRRRR! But thanks for posting - I'm nowhere near your league but I was dreaming of an industrial, cos my high end Bernina is too finicky for furious FME. Maybe I'll go back to plan A, a simple lock stitch Juki? But need to try before I buy this time.

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  2. I did try it ...... But silly me didn't thread the machine ... it was all set up for me..... BIG MISTAKE.... When you test drive, ask to start from scratch and thread the whole thing, bobbin and everything ... switch on and off yourself. Makes sense really but I didnt think and just whizzed around.

    Good luck!

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  3. Hope you can fix the problem, I agree nothing more frustrating than breaking thread. Your piece looks amazing in the previous post and really inspires me to do something really different.

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  4. Isn't it frustrating... and why does thread breakage happen with some colours and not others even if they are the same brand!!! Yep let's go design a machine for creatives... I want one with a large "harp" I think its called, the gap between needle and body - straight, zig zag and easily free machines, and that's it. Janome make a machine with a large harp... but it also comes with a zillion fancy auto stitches, which I'd never use, so I don't want to pay for. Oh and take your own fabrics that you use to test drive... they often offer up fabrics which anyone could produce nice stitching on. Recent shock to find daylight bulbs are available for SOME machines - why not all - huge gap in the market.

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  5. Lol, sorry but just had to laugh. I too have just purchased a new machine, it too is bloody disappointing, I have wasted so much ******* time and thread recently I just want to bin the thing and have done with it, but it cost an arm and a bloody leg, so now its really difficult to work! Really hope it works for you, I know how annoying it is. :{

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  6. I can sympathise with your your anxt - particularly difficult when you have such a tight deadline. What about ... using your old machine for this project and then giving it another whirl after you've done the big piece? As to another machine - did you look at the big new Bernina - 800 series - they go much faster than any others and they have a humungous bobbin? Just a thought.

    Good luck with the machine AND the delicious tall man!

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  7. Poor you, sympathies all the way. As Virginia said, do you still have your old machine to use? I hope you didn't take it in as part exchange.

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  8. Don't worry All..... the machine has gone back... nothing lost.
    The lovely man at the shop was extremely understanding and accepting that the machine was not the right one for me. Drama over.

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  9. Ok, that's good news Louise - now tell us how you're coping now? And what's the next idea for a machine?

    Hope the exercises are keeping you from seizing up?

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