I had an unusual 3 hours to myself today, so I decided to finish Max's koi nobori (carp streamer). I had been drafting a pattern and finally finished it, plus I managed to pin and cut this morning. So three hours should be plenty of time, right? For the fins I decided to do a rolled edge with special sparkly thread I had gotten yesterday. And since I had just taken a 3 day, 9 hour course on my serger, I should be able to do this with no problem, right?
Well, as you can guess, the answers to these questions is "no". Despite my 9 hours of serger study, I still managed to spend about 2.5 of my 3 hours trying to figure out how to do an acceptable rolled hem. It didn't help that I was using specialty thread, which usually requires tension adjustment. I finally backed off to plain ol' white thread, discovered and fixed my problems there (improperly seated needle, thread not staying in tension disks), then put the specialty thread in and had to do just minor tension adjustments.
By the end of my work period, I had managed to put rolled-hem edges on all my fins: one dorsal fin, two tail fins, and four side fins. In the pictures you see all the fins, then a close-up of my hard-won rolled hem. Whew! I was pretty disappointed at my progress, as well as at my lack of ability to do a simple, d!@#$%!@# rolled hem after 9 hours of class! But then I realized that I had learned something: I was much better able to diagnose the problems this time. I know that 2.5 hours of diagnosing sounds like a lot, but before I had spent more time trying to figure out my machine. One day I'll be able to use it better, I hope.
That sounds so frustrating! I'm glad you were able to figure it out. It's going to be so fabulous when you're done!
Posted by: myra | Thursday, 28 April 2005 at 11:46 AM