Wednesday 14 November 2012

Scrimping Through The Eye Of A Needle

I do love my little sewing machine but sometimes I wonder if she's a bit wasteful.  Imagine!  The very gadget I bought to turbo charge my scrimping.  But sometimes I look at Janome (it's "Ja-GNOME-ay" says The Sewing Machine Man), with her two tails of dangling thread and I just see pennies waiting to go down the drain.

Her methods are mysterious but I can tell you that, to get started without losing your thread back through the eye of the needle, she needs to have these two tails dangling at a length of at least 120mm.  When you finish your piece of stitching those tails will be hanging out of the start of it and all you can do is trim them off and pull out a similar length for next time.  That means, if you have a lot of pieces to stitch, you end up with a pile of waste threads big enough to make One Mean Housewife choke on her gruel.

Tonight's project is to repurpose some redundant facecloths into reusable baby wipes by cutting into quarters and hemming off the raw edges.  I'm going to sew two dozen pieces so that's 24 x 240mm, which is a whopping 5.76m of wasted thread, and it really is good for nothing, unless you have a lot of vacuum cleaners that need destroying.

Here's my prudent plan:

Rather than trim off each piece after sewing and pull out a new pair of tails to start the next, you can put the next piece straight under and sew, like this:



That saves pulling out a length of thread just to waste it and you end up with, instead of a dozen pieces each with a tail, with a little string of bunting with just a tiny length of thread between the pieces for trimming off, like this:



23 tail-ends saved (can't save the first one) with an average join of 20mm x 2.  So that's (240-40) x 23 = 4600, 4.6 metres of thread still safely on the reel and away from helpless Hoovers and Housewives.


One Mean Housewife, desperately seeking to quantify her thriftiness, Googles the price of thread.

2 comments:

  1. Saves effort too.

    I've been trying to work out whether gluing up the hem of my study curtains will be satisfactorier/easier compared to sewing them up, and so far have done neither, thus saving time and effort and thread and heartache.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hmm, hemming curtains gives me sadness. I've got a pair that are still trailing on the ground after at least a couple of years because I can't decide what to do. You can have a flouncy, boudoir effect by having them trailing, but only if the rest of the decor suits that and not trailing by more than a few inches.

    Have you washed the curtains? There's a good chance they'll go up a few inches first time you do and you don't want to hem then, then have to wash them and then end up with them too short.

    Glue v. thread. Thread is stronger than the gluey iron-on tape stuff, but the bottom of your curtains won't be washed or interfered with much, so I'd just use the tape.

    ReplyDelete