Disastrous Stitches

I recently bought a wonderful, boutique dress pattern and began with the peasant dress for Mary (having been inspired by this mother-seamstress). I found the most fabulous local sewing shop where I could have stayed for three days, stocked with peanut butter jelly sandwiches, looking at fabric. And with facing (essentially) two weeks of Chris being gone on business, I was really looking forward to using all my alone time to sew late into the night after the children were asleep. I mean really looking forward to it.

Above is the nearly finished dress.

Ruffle

Bodice connected to skirt

Sleeve

Any veteran seamstresses looking at those photos should see something very wrong leap out at them: the seams. I am such a novice sewer that I kept noticing the seams and thinking they looked odd, but not much more than that. The feeling kept niggling at me. Nearly finishing the dress and the seams getting worse and worse, I realized something was dreadfully wrong. Scouring my instruction manual revealed the diagnosis: The needle tension thread is too loose, causing the needle thread to appear on the wrong side of the fabric and the bobbin thread not even to connect with the needle thread, so that on one side there is just a series of useless loops. Meaning that these seams are going to fall apart, minimally the first time the dress is laundered and maybe the first time it is worn. (It's especially irritating because I was such a perfectionist, trying to make the dress look as professional as possible, that I topstitched every single seam. Seamstresses know how much double work that is.)

After brainstorming with my seamstress aunt and seamstress friend Sarah, I have tried everything possible to tighten the needle thread tension, so we think that the hook timing is off, which can only be cured by the machine being serviced. I had planned to have it serviced soon (as I haven't had it serviced in, um, the four-and-a-half years since receiving it), but wanted to finish some sewing projects first.

Sadly, that will not be the case and I'll be finding a service technician today. I suppose I'll be using all my upcoming alone time to work on a cross-stitching project inside.