Bronx Quilter: Spending Quality Time With My Featherweight

Saturday, December 23, 2017

Spending Quality Time With My Featherweight

Now that the Christmas gift quilt is finished, my plan was to get back to focusing on the Bonnie Hunter mystery projects. That is until I sat down to sew and my old Euro-Pro machine wouldn't stitch! It's running and I can pull up the bobbin thread but the machine will not form stitches. I believe that means the timing is off on the bobbin race. So the bad news is that now, once again right before Christmas, both of my primary machines need to go in for repair which I'll do after New Year's.

The good news is that this time, I have a back-up for the back-up machine: Fanny, my Featherweight is fully operational for this go-round!

I guess it was an omen that I had recently bought some accessories for it. Singer-Featherweight.com had a Christmas sale for most of December and during that I got:

I had long wanted the seam guide and they were selling these canvas accessory bags below cost because they were manufactured slightly smaller than the size they had wanted them to be. For me it was perfect because it is just what I needed to store all of my Featherweight stuff in. I had also long been eyeing some free-motion feet on eBay:

A while back (during another sale) I had purchased a feed dog cover plate for the Featherweight. I've read both pros and cons regarding doing free-motion on the Featherweight and wanted to be able to try it. Sew-Vac was offering a discount on all the feet I wanted so my Christmas present to myself was to get them. Why three kinds? I use each of these kinds of feet -- closed toe, open toe, and echo -- on my other machines depending on the project so wanted to have them all for the Featherweight too.

This is also good because on my "To Do" list has been plans to make a carry bag for the Featherweight since my machine didn't come with a case. In both of the bag patterns I have, the bodies need to be quilted so it will give me a chance to test the new feet out.

For now though, it will be a while before I can put the feet to the test since I need to catch up on the Bonnie stuff. Part 5 for "On Ringo Lake" dropped on Friday but I'm still working on Part 3:

It's said that the Featherweights weren't designed to work efficiently with cross wound thread spools and it's better to use a thread guide with them to feed the thread to the machine. In my post about the Christmas gift quilt, I had talked about my old cast iron thread stand and how I had lost the center pole that holds the thread. Right after posting that, I found a solution for a replacement right under my nose: as you can see in the picture above, I found a wooden dowel in my quilt space that was just the right circumference to fit the hole in the stand! The next thing I'll purchase for Fanny is a dedicated thread stand that will fit in the top oil hole of the machine that will also allow the thread to sit on the machine's spool pin.