Skulls for School: Sewing with Alfred

“When you come to visit, will you help me with a sewing project?” Alfred asked during one of our excited phone calls leading up to my visit.  “Of course.”  Alfred’s a pretty simple person, so I figured whatever she wanted couldn’t be too complicated.  I was sort of right.

Alfred explained that at her work – she works at a dental school – there’s a lot of old xrays that she’s helping to catalogue.  The school has a special scanner for digitizing these xrays, and dust was getting into the scanner. Dust in the scanner is not a good thing.  She heard of another group who had a cover for their xray machine and thought her school should have one, too. 

Mommy had just made a plethora of really cute sewing machine covers for her hoards of sewing machines.  “Ok,” I thought, “I can just modify Mommy’s sewing machine cover pattern a little bit.”  That general idea worked, but it turned out to be more than “just” and way more than “a little bit.”  The xray scanner is rather huge.

It’s deep; you can see here it’s as deep as the counter, which is deeper than the computer tall.  It’s tall, almost two-computer towers tall.  And it’s wide.  It’s also not as nicely rectangular as Mommy’s sewing machines.

Alfred and I went to her work and took measurements of the scanner, every dimension.  Then we headed off to her local JoAnn’s to find the perfect fabric.

And boy did we ever find the perfect fabric!  Luckily, JoAnn still had some old Halloween fabric on clearance.  It took us about a half hour and two sweeps of the whole store to find it, but once we did, Bingo!  Dancing skeletons for the main body and teethy skulls for the ruffle trim.  Perfect for the scanning dental xrays.

 

The machine cover pattern Mommy had used had a few odd errors in it, which were compounded when I multiplied fabric-piece measurements to match the behemoth machine.  I found myself trimming off extra inches on the main piece after it was assembled.  And somehow, I didn’t multiply enough for the trim fabric, so the ruffle couldn’t go all the way around and still be a ruffle.  That turned out to actually be a good think as there wasn’t enough room behind the machine for a ruffle anyway.

Alfred’s machine was not a fan of stitching on the heavy batting and I repeatedly had to pull tangled masses of thread out of the bobbin feeder.   Alfred shrugged; she had no idea how to make it work better and neither did I.  In a final fit of frustration, I called Mommy.  She waved her magic Mommy wand and the machine started behaving.  I don’t know how she does it, but that always seems to work.

By the time I finished sewing the lining into our giant, quilted box, I wanted to hide inside of it and scare Nathy-Boo.  It seemed the perfect size.  I was wrong; I’m bigger than I think.

When it was all done, we took the new machine cover to Alfred’s work and put it on the machine.  It fit nicely, yay!  I hope they have been getting good use out of it.

Pattern: Moda's Half Moon Modern Sewing Room: Sewing Machine Cover

Football and all those Famous Folks

This past holiday season, I had the wonderful opportunity of going to visit Alfred and Nathy-Boo at their home in Cleveland.   My dearest sister put up with me let me stay for a whole week!  We had tons of fun.

Now, in case you haven’t noticed from previous posts (about skirts and socks and life), Alfred is a huge Packer fan.  And I’m pretty fond of football as well.  So I knew she’d at least think about it when I begged, “Can we go to the Football Hall of Fame? Please? Pretty please?”  And we did.

One snowy morning, we got in her car, fishtailed out the driveway and sludged down the freeway to Canton and the Pro Football Hall of Fame.  It’s a drive that, to Alfred, is a bit of a roadtrip, but in Bay Area terms is just around the corner.  We had fun counting cars spun out in the ditches on our way there.

The museum – or whatever it is – is pretty neat.  I liked the exhibit on old football gear the best.  My top favorite was the old nose guard that was supposed to prevent broken noses.  Players stopped using it when it became apparent that the guard caused more broken noses than it prevented.  Reminds me a bit of discussions around a current piece of equipment…

The busts of all the inductees was pretty neat, too, especially since there’s so many Packers.  Sadly, there’s less Packers than Bears.  The video display of Ditka is also very cool, but Ditka’s such a part of American culture now that anything with him would be cool.  I didn’t know he used to be a player, so I learned something new!

Alfred didn’t take too kindly to one of the displays, which amused some of the other patrons.

The part of our visit that surprised me most was something that shouldn’t have been surprising; I’d just forgotten.  We were practically the only females in the place, and definitely the only females without male accompaniment, even though it was quite busy.  You see, where we come from, everyone’s a football fan.  There’s no such thing as football widows.  The loudest screamers and angriest yellers are always my aunts.  Mommy’s great-nieces have jerseys practically as soon as their born, same as her great-nephews.  But I guess the rest of the country isn’t quite the same.  Wisconsinites really are the luckiest people on earth.

And we got our picture taken with the Lombardi trophy!