Thursday 5 December 2013

Random Lesson

One of my students was hand sewing, even though she has a sewing machine.  " I hate it" she told me - "the tension is rubbish, I wish I'd never bought it". I suggested she bring the machine in and I'd help her love it. (There speaks the voice of confidence!)

Well, in it came, and I went to show her how to thread it . . . and stopped!  You know the "back-on-itself" / tension bit in the bobbin compartment - well it wasn't there, nothing , just a smooth compartment

We agreed I would take it and let her know when I'd solved it.  Husband looked at it for me, and was equally stumped. No back-on-itself bit meant no tension, so the stitches were rubbish.

She hadn't brought the book of words, so we checked lots of chat rooms and forums and they were mostly very critical of the machine, especially the threading of it - so no help for us!  The manufacturers kindly emailed me an instruction book, and one tiny sentence stood out as strange - you should only use metal bobbins.  Strange because nearly all machines use plastic these days, and very strange given that the "goodie bag" she got with it had PLASTIC bobbins in!  

Anyway we decided to try a metal one just to eliminate that issue - and it worked! Astonishingly, the ring in the base of the bobbin compartment is magnetic, and that provides the bobbin tension.

From despairing with it, and agreeing with the critical reviews, I have now fallen in love with  the Beldray 12 stitch mini. A great starter/lesson machine, with choice of foot pedal or start/stop button, it's lightweight and comes with a carry bag - shame it comes with rubbish instructions and a confusing, misleading goodie bag  

(No affiliation :-)

9 comments:

  1. Glad you were able to solve the puzzle Benta, what a strange set up for the machine!

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  2. Aren't you a sweetheart for figuring it out.

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  3. Looking at Google results for Brldray it would seem that they don't specialise in sewing machines as they also also sell steam mops, vacuum cleaners and heaters! You've done a great job sorting this out for her and hope she now loves her machine, but I think she needs to have gone for a well known machine make that have some lovely little basic machines at budget prices

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  4. how bizarre! wonder if they have had many complaints .. or are sewers just voting with their feet and going else where xx

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  5. never heard of that before! do you know what to do with a janome that wont stop sewing?!

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  6. How strange - and how fab that you have worked out how to make it sew nicely again! Nice to hear a good news story like that!

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  7. Was this in your teacher training toooooooo? We done on solving the mystery.

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  8. Wish I could have you as my teacher ;-)) Your student must be over the moon ...

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  9. Well there you go, you learn something new every day!

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