Come Stitch With Me

“I’m at the warehouse,” read the text message from my coworker.

She was at our school district’s behemoth warehouse looking for tables. In a flash, I receive photos of several sewing machines that she’d discovered. One of the high schools had disbanded its interior design program (aka home economics) when the supervising teacher retired. Several of the machines had been sent to the warehouse as surplus.

“Tag the Janome and the blue Brother,” I replied.

Both machines arrived at school a few days later. They were in sad shape. The Brother was immediately pronounced DOA as it was seized up.  The Janome, on the other hand, was a different story. While filthy and obviously neglected, I was still able to make decent stitches by simply advancing the hand wheel. I immediately ordered a replacement foot pedal/power supply, extension table and thread guide.

With the new parts, the machine sewed well enough to be used during Friday clubs. Clubs are now a thing of the past, so the question became, “What to do with this one?” I decided to keep her. I spent time servicing and cleaning her up today. What a difference! I could not believe all the crud that was under the bobbin area – broken needles, extreme lint and thread wrapped around the gears.

My FW maintenance class served me well. I have confidence in my ability to service my own machines and most of the tools already on hand to fix minor problems I encounter during a service. Is the service perfect? Oh definitely not!  However, said machine now sews beautiful stitches with very little noise. Besides, I can always take the machine to the mechanic  if it’s beyond my abilities.

Since so many of us have four-legged quality assurance supervisors in our sewing studios, thought I’d share this post.

In the 25 years I’ve owned dogs, I’ve never ever needed to use emergency vet services…until a week ago!

It’s very much like taking your human family members to the emergency room. Something was suddenly terribly wrong with Boomer, but I didn’t know what. I was worried about my dog and how much it was going to cost.

ER vet services are not cheap. Plan on about $500/day for care plus any tests, treatments and surgery your dog may need. 

Boomer came home very weak after five days in hospital, but glad to be home.  He was diagnosed with thrombocytopenia, an auto-immune disease that caused his body to suddenly start attacking his platelets (those things that cause your blood to clot). He was bleeding internally. I’m very thankful our primary care vet told me what to look for and to head to the ER vet ASAP if I noticed certain symptoms over the weekend.

My boy looks like he’s been in a fight. However, he’s slowing perking up and here’s hoping his follow-up visit tomorrow has his platelet counts continuing to move in the right direction. I want him around and enjoying life for as long as he can!

Empower:  “to make (someone) stronger and more confident, especially in controlling their life and claiming their rights.”

As in empowering myself to step outside my comfort zone and step up to claim opportunities for myself in all areas of my life. 

Something as simple as asking for a different table for dinner on New Year’s Eve (we got a prime window seat!)

Pushing the claims adjuster to get the claim resolved fairly and quickly.

Returning an item that did not meet expectations.

Holding up the line an extra 60 seconds to get the 50% discount on the expensive item that the cashier missed (even though the customer behind me was complaining loudly).

Having that difficult, long overdue conversation with a coworker because I’m tired of her crap.

**Setting boundaries and learning to say “no” without feeling guilty.

**Putting myself out there to generate more teaching and tech editing opportunities for my biz (a/k/a marketing).

These (**) are the two biggies. My other two potential words of the year were “intentional” and “discipline.” I’m going to need both of those to help “empower” myself to accomplish these two items.