One of the really great things about Mom was she didn't know how to do things, but she did them anyway. For instance, she didn't know how to roof a house, but she probably asked someone ... at the hardware store or perhaps a neighbor ... and the next thing you know, she climbed up onto the house, tied a rope around her waist, attached it to to the roof (to break her fall if she slipped) and started roofing her house. And when she decided to build a carport, she just DID it. She was absolutely fearless about that sort of thing. Remind me to tell you the story about the wasps sometime ... but not now.
Back to my story, yesterday I had a Mama moment.
DH bought me an embroidery sewing machine about 6 months ago and I've been movin and groovin with it ever since. It's been a real learning experience. It's taken a lot of study plus tons of trial and error (with occasional shouts of "YOU RAT B%ST%RD! WHAT'S YOUR PROBLEM!!), but I mastered the machine and have been producing ever since. I'm down to the forging-new-paths stage -- removing blocks of the design and combining it with other designs to produce a whole new thang -- MY thang.
However, yesterday -- two-thirds of the way through a large project -- the machine began to screech jest a leetle bit. Then it suddently got real loud and the needle froze into position. This is where the Mama thing comes in. I unscrewed some parts, oiled it where the manual said to oil it, but decided to oil it up there too -- you know -- right up there! It certainly LOOKED like those were oil holes and it's right where that needle thingy used to move up and down until it froze. Sooo, I oiled it and moved the wheel manually a little back and forth as much as I could, oiled it some more and moved it some more, back and forth till it was moving better. However, all that moving back and forth -- or maybe it was from the big freeze-up -- got the needle out of sinc with the bobbin. At first I thought I was going to have to take the bobbin area apart which is really scary. There's a lot of screws and doo-dads in there. So I just snapped a picture that area and printed it out. My plan was to tape every piece I removed to it's position on the picture. That way I could figure out how to put it back together again afterwards. (Sweet DH called me a genius for thinking of this. I'm so proud!) However, first I grabbed a little screwdriver and slowly move the bobbin thingy jest a tad till it started working again.
When DH got home (and showered me with compliments) he asked if I had blown out the bobbin area to remove the dust. "Sure! See ..." and I bent over and started blowing on it, real hard. He just looked at me (pause) and grabbed one of those canned air things and blew all the thread dust out of there. I couldn't believe how much had collected in there. And my pitiful little lungs didn't dislodge it at all. Live and learn, huh!
My machine is hummin better than it ever has and I'm so proud of myself! I have Mom's blood in my veins for sure.
Now, to finish that project ....
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