Over the weekend, I think it was Sunday, I dragged our old Singer sewing machine out of the attic to see if it would work well enough to be worth taking to Maine. We haven’t used it in fifteen or twenty years — we replaced it with a Necchi that has a free arm, which is really nice for sleeves, and a very easy way of doing buttonholes. When I tried the Singer it was running, but didn’t have enough oomph to get started by itself on more than one layer of medium-weight fabric. I took the end plate off and found that the belt was loose and looked as if it was getting set to break. I let Google do the walking and found a replacement belt on eBay. I figured it was worth risking $10 or so on it rather than paying someone who knows what they’re doing to fix it, or to buy a replacement.
\nThe belt arrived today — pretty good for $2.50 shipping — so I tried to put it on. It was too tight. After some struggling with it I realized that the machine just might have an adjustment for the motor position to allow for variation and stretching of belts. Sure enough, when I took the bottom off the machine I found an eccentric wheel holding one side of the motor. Moving it allowed the belt to fit on.<\/p>\n
When I put it all together and tried it, the machine ran and could handle a couple of thicknesses of heavy fabric, but ran very slowly. It had been running nice and fast, though weakly, when I tried it on Sunday, so I figured the speed problem was something I had done. I sighed, took it all apart again, loosened the belt adjustment a little, and now it’s running up to speed. So maybe it’s really fixed. Maybe now it’s too loose. I’ll find out the first time I try to hem a pair of jeans with it.<\/p>\n
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Indexed a bunch of stamp mounts for orders that came in recently, and five new designs besides.<\/p>\n
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My injured finger is enough better that I’ve been able to do two-color stranded knitting. I’m up to the start of round 9 of a 24-row block of pattern. That’s maybe four rows in the last couple of days.\n<\/p>\n
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Over the weekend, I think it was Sunday, I dragged our old Singer sewing machine out of the attic to see if it would work well enough to be worth taking to Maine. We haven’t used it in fifteen or twenty years — we replaced it with a Necchi that has a free arm, which … <\/p>\n