A few months ago, I made the decision that I need to either start sewing, or get rid of the sewing machine that I have sitting in my basement. I decided to pick a project and see if the sewing machine that I have even works. I thought that maybe I would make the girls some nightgowns for Christmas, so several months ago I found and bought a pattern. Then a couple months ago I bought some material. While we were in California for the Thanksgiving holiday I had my mom help me get one started so I could see how to put them together and all that. In fact, mom and I pulled an all nighter trying to get the first nightgown mostly finished just so she could walk me through the whole process.
I came home feeling confident that I can do this. Then I pulled out MY machine and plugged it in and tried to get it threaded and going. I couldn’t get it to work. As Christmas drew nearer I started stressing out and really wanted to finish these nightgowns, but only had the first one almost done. A week before Christmas I expressed my frustration on facebook and a friend of mine offered to help. So she came over and showed me how to get my machine threaded, and yay it worked. Apparently I had just put the bobbin in backwards and missed one loop for threading the thread on top. I got all the fabric cut out and put the pieces together. Later in the week my friend came back again to show me how to attach the yokes of the nightgowns to the dress parts. And then I got all those put together. The only real problem I ran into with the machine is that EVERY stitch is microscopic and it wouldn’t gather for me, so I had to do all the gathering of the trim and dresses by hand. I decided to slip Lydia’s gown on her to make sure it fit, but her head wouldn’t go through AT ALL. So I made another yoke for her, and decided to test it before sewing it to the dress, that one was too small too! So I had to make yet another one. This time it worked.
Christmas Eve, I was almost done. I finished up the last of the nightgowns, and all I had left was buttons and button holes. I went to my friends house to have her show me how to do button holes and it seemed simple enough, but for some reason wasn’t working when we tried to do it to the nightgowns. So she called another friend and sent me over there, and her machine had the same problem, and she suspects that it’s just because the interfacing is slipping and therefore the thread was getting caught and the machine got stuck. I bought the most darling, blue flower shaped buttons to put on them so hopefully I will figure out how to get them on, but in the meantime here is a picture of the finished (minus the buttons) nightgowns. 🙂
