Another year another costume…..
Well, since we’ re so close to Halloween….a little over a week a way. I’m gonna start by talking about my Halloween ritual. I have a nephew. He just turned 8 and I’ve been putting together his costumes every year since he was one.
I might post some pictures of some of the costumes I’ve done for him. Last year, he was Jack Skellington from A Nightmare Before Christmas and the year before that he was Spongebob Squarepants. I even made him a Gary-shaped Halloween bag. This year, we’ve decided to attempt to make a Classic Popeye costume.
When he was little and first started to talk, he couldn’t pronounce costume so he would say “custom”. So, I’ve committed to making his “custom” costume each year rather than just purchasing one. This is my yearly gift to him, for Halloween.
The Classic Sailor?
I hope….!
The problem that I’ve hit up against is that my sewing machine, which is at this point probably 15 – 20 years old now, decided to finally give up the ghost. I started doing some initial test stitching, making sure everything was working OK, but it kept breaking the needle.
I’m pretty good at taking things apart and putting them back together, so I took it apart. I kind of had to look at a couple of YouTube videos and do a little bit of research, but I got the covers off and finally understood how the looping mechanism works. You know…what grabs the thread from the needle. So I figured it was an issue with the timing, so I started adjusting the timing.
Everything looked good at first. It was going through the motion, but after maybe 1 or 2 rotations or dives of the needle, it was right back where I started, it would hit the needle. So, I started taking it further and further apart, and that’s when I realized what was actually wrong with the sewing machine.
It was a little cracked gear that turns a vertical rod in the center of the sewing machine.
HOW MUCH??
So, I took the machine over to a local repair shop and asked how much the part was, they told me ten bucks. Then, I asked them how much for their technician to replace it, and they told me is was gonna be $91. Now, $91 is probably not, in the grand scheme of things, a LARGE amount of money. But considering that I was already thinking about replacing the machine, I just thought it would be a little too much investment in money to put into this machine.
I mean it’s been a real trooper. It’s gotten me through 7 years of costumes
but a hundred and something dollars for the repair was just too much for it. The machines that I’ve been looking at are brand new, with two needles and I can get one for more or less the same price. So, I purchased the $10 gear and now I’m gonna go ahead and take the machine apart and hope that I can put it back together, because without this I don’t know how I’m gonna be sewing the parts of his costume.
So, wish me luck and I’ll keep you posted.
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I’ll be updating you periodically. As I go along, the site will get bigger and more and more useful.
Thanks go out to these sites for the images in this post
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