A Small Squee of Delight

When I was little, I thought sewing machines were the most amazing things ever. I loved threading, how the thread got wound around the machine all over the place. I used to pretend I was threading a sewing machine by winding yarn around all the knobs on my dresser. I could never quite understand, though, how the little needles managed to make so many stitches so fast.

Then I found this description of how the mechanisms of sewing machines work on How Stuff Works and literally sat there and stared at the little Flash movies for half an hour. So that’s how it does it! [the picture below is a pause of one of the Flash movies]. The whole article is just interesting, if you’re a fan of figuring out how stuff works. Finally knowing how my machine works is FABULOUS. I’m incredibly thrilled by this, and the next page in this shows the internal gears.  You can tell it really bothers me when I’m not sure how things are doing what they’re doing!

While I’m blathering on about learning how stuff works, I thought I might also mention these lovely pieces of knowledge as well, for minds of neverending curiosity.

In honor of putting in a zipper: the Glue-Set Zipper for a skirt from Sew, Mama, Sew; sewing a zippered pocket into a bag lining from U-Hanbag; a flat fly-front zipper for clothes video with Sandra Betzina on Threads (really the clearest of these tutorials, but maybe that’s the video); various other zipper types (lapped, invisible) also from Threads.  And the one I’ll be hopefully using this week or next, a concealed bag zipper with casing also from U-Handbag.

How dress forms are made -  I always thought seeing your shape via dress form was probably the best way to figure out how a piece of clothing will work on you. Well, this is a video about the process of professional dress form construction. I find it odd they start out as a base of wet cardboard.

Just noticed Margaret Wertheim’s TED talk on coral reefs and hyberbolic geometry, as modeled by crochet. It still seems funny to me that something as simple as crochet increases could so easily model a mathematical concept as difficult to conceptualize as hyberbolic space.

I’ll leave you with this: speaking of crochet, still one of my favorite explanations of how stuff works is the structural/sculptural possibilities of crochet as demonstrated by Jessica Polka of Wunderkammer for a class she taught. One day, I will make one of these. It’s not only useful, it’s pretty!