This doesn’t have anything to do with quilting, and not a whole lot to do with working on machines, but I did “slightly remodel” my machine for a job this morning.
A young lady brought me her denim jacket to sew her back patch on for her. She had ironed the patch on (as instructed when she bought the patch, I think), but after wearing it a couple of times, the edges all came loose.
I don’t know about other places, but here in Oklahoma, we get our share of embroidered patches with feathers included around the outer edges. The feather tips make for a nightmare of narrow points to tack down. I’ve seen some that the sewist didn’t even try to follow the raised border, because they’re hard to do. When you cut across though, those feather tips end up curling up with use.
I started out sewing it on my Singer 319 Treadle and regular Tex30 thread, but I couldn’t see all of the changes in direction that I needed to follow, because the foot blocked my view. I ended up ripping those “choppy” stitches out. Finally, it dawned on me that the best machine to use in this case would be my Singer 31-15 Treadle. It is set up with an original roller foot that runs on just one side of the needle, making needle placement a bunch easier. The view of where the needle hits is never blocked. The second benefit of the 31-15 is the knee lift. Although the narrow roller allows for lots of direction changing while sewing, there were still plenty of times when the knee lift was needed. Lifting the presser foot on the 319 about wore me out in just a few inches of sewing earlier. Also, I have my 31-15 set up to use Tex90 thread, and the heavier thread looks good on an embroidered patch anyway, IMO. The larger harp size to spin that jacket in didn’t hurt anything either.
The modification that I did to my 31-15 was nothing more than dropping the treadle belt off and sewing with it by using one finger in the spokes of the hand wheel. Kind of like a poor man’s hand crank. Starting and stopping every one or two stitches trying to treadle required me to have my right hand on the wheel anyway, so dropping the belt off illuminated the interference of the belt. I still had to stop and use both hands for a lot of the positioning because the denim fabric wasn’t stiff enough to use just one hand to spin things without getting wrinkles, and I had to pay close attention not to let my knee rest against the lift lever while making a stitch, but things went very well and it didn’t take very long at all.
CD in Oklahoma