Your Sewing Machine

This course takes the machine sitting in your closet and makes it ordinary. You will learn its parts by name, thread it correctly every time, wind and seat a bobbin, and sew a straight seam that holds. From there the course works through the things that separate frustration from control: what tension actually does to the loop of thread inside the fabric and how to read a stitch to know which side is pulling too hard; stitch length in millimetres and when to lengthen or shorten it; the numbers on a needle package, what 80/12 means, and why a ballpoint needle belongs in knit and a sharp in poplin; the presser feet that came in the box and the two or three worth buying; buttonholes worked by machine; and the short routine of brushing out lint and oiling that keeps an older machine running for another forty years. The final unit is diagnostic — skipped stitches, birds' nests underneath, breaking thread, puckered seams — and closes with a plain explanation of what a serger does and does not do, so you can decide whether you need one.

It is written for adults. Most who take it are parents sewing out of thrift and necessity, mending what would otherwise be thrown away and making what would otherwise be bought. Nothing here is padding. Where a caution belongs — a hot iron, a needle near your fingers, the presser foot as your hand guard, a small child in a room with pins on the floor — it is said once, clearly, and then we move on. You do not need a new machine or an expensive one. A borrowed straight-stitch machine from 1968 will carry you through every lesson in this course.

Ten units of ten lessons each, one hundred lessons in all, entirely self-paced. Each lesson is a short reading and a ten-question quiz that grades itself, so you can work through a unit in an evening or a lesson at a time between other duties. Scripture runs through the teaching rather than sitting on top of it. This is old work and honored work: the women in Exodus 35 who did spin with their hands and brought what they had spun, Bezalel and Aholiab filled with the Spirit of God in all manner of workmanship, the virtuous woman of Proverbs 31 who seeketh wool and flax and worketh willingly with her hands, and Dorcas, whose neighbors stood weeping and showing the coats and garments she had made while she was with them. The course returns steadily to those themes — patient skill, honest work done as unto the Lord and not unto men, thrift, generosity with what your hands can make, and clothing that is modest and becoming, sewn as a quiet kindness to the people who have to look at us.