Stitchin' it Old School

I figured today's "little" project would be easy once I got everything set up ... I thought wrong.  Last night I tucked Camster into her cabinet and folded it up, which makes it easy to see how she spent a year impersonating an end table, then broke out Timex, my ridiculously sturdy $80 WalMart Brother LX-3125.

Timex, my Brother LX-3125 mechanical

Timex is so named simply because he survived my first six months of sewing.  This is the little mechanical that could ... sew through poly boning both length-ways and cross-ways, go through an entire Elizabethan corset corded with hemp craft cord, and plow through through five layers of heavy drapery for my pirate coat.  I treated this poor little bottom-of-the-line plastic machine as if it was a heavy-duty industrial model ... and it still sews.  But this morning, Timex met his match ... my son's "papa-san" chair.

I tried to sew using upholstery thread, a topstitching needle ... and probably too many layers of fabric.  So I am resorting to hand-stitching this thing back together.  When I was up in Indiana, I managed to find a pair of Machingers gloves recommended to me a few months ago by Nay, an avid quilter who also has done bridal sewing and gave me all kinds of useful advice on sewing my silk charmeuse tunic.  These do help grip the needle for pulling it through the layers, but don't protect me from accidentally putting the needle point up and under my thumbnail.

So I have one corner fixed, halfway through the other, and still one more to go.  Then I have the fun of putting the "pillows" pieces back in right.

Something unusual from last night: my usually camera-shy Cuddle Kitty posed just long enough for me to snap a pic of him.  This time, he wasn't posing on the new Camster cabinet (I have been shooing him and the Terrorist Kitty off that cabinet since I set it up!) or a pile of fabric.  So I now have a cute pic of my only skinny cat:

my camera-shy Cuddle Kitty

Now y'all know where the darker cat hair comes from ...