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As a side project to keep me sane, I've been working on a decorative version of the electro-mechanical sunglasses which use the (very expensive!) brass gears that I originally bought but was unable to use. One of the things I wanted to try was making them full goggles, as the weight of the original version required a strap anyway. I wanted to make leather rings for the eye padding, which is why I bought the surprisingly leather jacket mentioned earlier.
I made a pattern, cut them out, and started sewing last Sunday. It was very, very slow going, hand-sewing through two layers of leather. I managed to get one done, poorly, and the next day my finger/wrist joints were NOT happy. There has to be a better way, I thought. Why don't I use the drill press sitting in the kitchen? All that lovely mechanical advantage to push the needle through. But getting it all lined up will be a pain, and I'll still have to pull it the rest of the way through each time. Unless...
...unless I used the drill press as a sewing machine!
So I chucked a sewing machine needle (the kind with the eye at the tip) up in the drill press, and tried piercing the leather -- SO EASY. And away I went. As it turns out, sewing this way isn't too bad. You're just replicating the motion of a mechanical sewing machine, using a second needle and thread to replace the bobbin. The results were 10x better looking, and didn't involve any joint pain. There have been a couple other bits of leather sewing I'm still doing by hand, but for all the big, complicated stretches I've been doing it this way, including redoing the original piece.
First you pierce the fabric with the main needle. (This was even easier once I drilled a small hole in a metal plate and clamped it to the drill press table, so the leather couldn't be pushed down with the needle.)
Now pull the needle back a bit. (Or in the case of conveniently grippy leather, push it back down a bit.) This will create loops of thread on either side of the needle. Pass the secondary thread through one of them. The correct one to chose is the one that isn't directly connected to the spare thread on the topside. Give it a tug to make sure.
Now pull the needle all the way back up. Pull both the main thread and the secondary until taunt. Be careful not to pull the main thread so hard that the secondary is pulled up through the cloth by the bight it passes through. (Or, if you do, do it consistently.)
That's it! That's all a mechanical sewing machine does, except instead of passing the secondary through with a needle the entire bobbin grabs the loop and pulls it around itself as it spins, plus a lot of fancy synchronized tensioning mechanisms to make it all work smoothly.
A brief search didn't show any evidence of this approach being documented before. (Maybe because who has a drill press and no sewing machine?) So I'm laying my claim to it with this post. Index away, Google!
I made a pattern, cut them out, and started sewing last Sunday. It was very, very slow going, hand-sewing through two layers of leather. I managed to get one done, poorly, and the next day my finger/wrist joints were NOT happy. There has to be a better way, I thought. Why don't I use the drill press sitting in the kitchen? All that lovely mechanical advantage to push the needle through. But getting it all lined up will be a pain, and I'll still have to pull it the rest of the way through each time. Unless...
...unless I used the drill press as a sewing machine!
So I chucked a sewing machine needle (the kind with the eye at the tip) up in the drill press, and tried piercing the leather -- SO EASY. And away I went. As it turns out, sewing this way isn't too bad. You're just replicating the motion of a mechanical sewing machine, using a second needle and thread to replace the bobbin. The results were 10x better looking, and didn't involve any joint pain. There have been a couple other bits of leather sewing I'm still doing by hand, but for all the big, complicated stretches I've been doing it this way, including redoing the original piece.
First you pierce the fabric with the main needle. (This was even easier once I drilled a small hole in a metal plate and clamped it to the drill press table, so the leather couldn't be pushed down with the needle.)
Now pull the needle back a bit. (Or in the case of conveniently grippy leather, push it back down a bit.) This will create loops of thread on either side of the needle. Pass the secondary thread through one of them. The correct one to chose is the one that isn't directly connected to the spare thread on the topside. Give it a tug to make sure.
Now pull the needle all the way back up. Pull both the main thread and the secondary until taunt. Be careful not to pull the main thread so hard that the secondary is pulled up through the cloth by the bight it passes through. (Or, if you do, do it consistently.)
That's it! That's all a mechanical sewing machine does, except instead of passing the secondary through with a needle the entire bobbin grabs the loop and pulls it around itself as it spins, plus a lot of fancy synchronized tensioning mechanisms to make it all work smoothly.
A brief search didn't show any evidence of this approach being documented before. (Maybe because who has a drill press and no sewing machine?) So I'm laying my claim to it with this post. Index away, Google!
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