My neighbor's house is pretty similar to mine and she has no servants, oxen or donkeys that I am aware of, but nonetheless I am having a pretty serious case of coveting. I am, in fact, in love.
It all started out innocently enough. Isn't that the way matters of the heart usually begin? I was only doing a good deed and as I am wont say, "No good deed goes unpunished."
I have a lovely neighbor. She is an elderly widow so we try to help her out whenever we can or as often as she will allow. The other day I went over with a container of lentil soup for her and noticed that she had some hand sewing out. I know she has arthritis in her hands so this sewing must have been progressing very slowly. She was hemming up some nightgowns. I offered to take the items home to do up on my sewing machine. "No," she said. "You have enough to do without doing things for me too. I have a sewing machine but I haven't used it in over 10 years. I don't even think it works anymore."
Bingo! I coaxed her into getting the machine out. It only needed a little adjusting and some oil to run smoothly. "Well, I could clear off my desk and use it here," my neighbor said hopefully. I took the machine home to get it running and that's when it happened. There was a cosmic shift and I fell down the proverbial rabbit hole.
This heavy metal baby sews like a dream! Straight, even and true. Plenty of work area and even another attachment to allow even more space to work on! And check this out:
"Automatic" decorative stitches! There are as many more on the flip side of the disk - those clever Germans!
I have a machine. A lovely Janome that embroiders, has disks with additional patterns and designs, a touch screen and all sorts of bells and whistles. It just doesn't have soul. It doesn't have nuts and bolts and screws that can be turned and tweaked. It can't be taken apart and put back together. It also doesn't have a manual that makes sense.
Alas, my affair will be fleeting. To salve my sorrow, I treated myself to making a gift for my neighbor on her machine. A kind of thank you for letting me play with her toy. She likes hearts and my heart belongs to this little Pfaff so I only thought it fitting to sew a heart-shaped pincushion. (Pattern here.)
Oh well, we'll always have Paris.
You are such a good writer :). My mom has a machine like that. If I could figure out how to get it into my luggage and where to store it in the apartment I'd go for breaking the 8th Commandment.
Posted by: simone | January 26, 2010 at 09:58 AM