Learning to sew

Top posting for ease...

Val, you say a lot here that I have to agree with.

I have been teaching both kids and adults to sew for a few years now, and I have found there is nothing on earth so likely to put people off sewing as poor machinery. It really doesn't matter whether the machine is new or old, if it doesn't work well, it's worse than useless.

I usually take my Lily to classes I teach. That way I know that whatever else happens in the day, I will at least have ONE working and reliable machine. I have been criticized for letting kids loose on this hi-tec bit of electronic wizardry, but I have to say in all my experience of different types of machines in different places, this is one of the easiest to operate and control and get good plain stitches from that I have encountered. The other one the kids and grannies all love is the 1923 Spinning Jenny - my Singer 66! On this there is little to learn and less to go wrong, and it is almost as easy to control as Lily.

Success is the key here - if you feed the kids a machine that they can use with ease and from which they get excellent results, they will go on to other better things. If you make them work on a clapped out heap of junk, they will not learn to love the process at all, unless they are dyed in the wool sewing junkies like me!

I learned to machine sew on my mother's Singer in Malta. On the journey there from the UK the thing was dropped into the hold of the ship, and the head cracked in two. The motor and some of the innards still worked, so a sewing machine mender in a funny little back street somewhere in Valetta found it a new head, some replacement bits, and cobbled the lot together. It worked - after a fashion! I learned to control that awkward foot button on the box thing by sewing in bare feet, machine on dining table, me on chair raised to the correct height with a pile of cushions, and the foot control on a pile of books! I made a skirt with a zip in it. I was eight, or thereabouts, and too ignorant to know that zips were supposed to be difficult. I don't remember learning to unpick on that project!

THAT project died of old age many moons ago - 34 years at least! - but you can see kids at work on my Lily on the teaching pages of my web site. The school in the picture has new Freesias, but a VERY untidy classroom. My preferred school for this sort of thing has 30 and 40 YO Berninas, but they are well loved and serviced regularly, and they usually work fairly well. The room is a spotless delight to work in.

I have taught in churches and church halls, properly equipped classrooms and places little better than a garden shed. My youngest pupils have been about 6 YO, and the oldest pushing 90 and a great granny. Without doubt, ALL of them have been pleased to use sewing machines that worked well, and a lot of the older students had tales of being discouraged in their youth by sewing machines that were not well maintained and didn't work well.

I was bought a new sewing machine in the 70's, for my 21st birthday, and I was sad to find that it was a lemon. I didn't own it long, and suffered pangs of guilt when I part exchanged it for a lovely little Frister & Rossman Cub 8, but the Singer lemon almost killed my sewing enthusiasm, and by then I was an experienced and confident seamster. I got better results from the old Spinning Jenny!

I do have to wonder at the unthinking cruelty these people are inflicting on their young relatives. They give them a heap of crap, expect them to be grateful, and the emotional damage caused by the guilt ain't worth thinking about! I was lucky, in that after I'd bought the nice little Cub 8, and told my mum and dad that I'd disposed of their

21st birthday present to me, they congratulated me on the part exchange deal I got! :)

The Cub 8 did 14 years slave labour, and finally died: it was a small light weight domestic machine, and I put 14 years of semi-professional use through it! I then bought a second hand Viscount, that was another dream machine, and when I bought the Lily two years later, I gave the Viscount to my mother to encourage her to get back into sewing. She no longer does a lot of sewing, but says it's so nice to have a machine that works properly when she does!

A good machine doesn't have to be new, or full of electronic gadgetry, it just has to work properly!

Oh, and a funny thought - my mother taught me to sew, but now comes to me for sew>

val and kate... so many good thoughts!! my daughter, now age 9, has been sewing on my viking

350 since she was five. of course, i supervise, and help...but she loves the machine! her cousin, age 10, loves my featherweight. both of them want me to get that treadle machien going (it needs a new belt and a good cleaning....)

good tools are not a luxery, they are a necessity!

betsey "we do not inherit the earth, we caretake it for our children"

I couldn't agree with you more, Val! What a travesty for youngsters in those situations. Emily

And if you offer them simple projects from the beginning, then build upon their skills, too, it will help them be successful.

Nothing succeeds like success, as the silly, trite saying (but oh, so true) goes.

Karen Maslowski in Cincinnati