Saturday, November 6, 2010

Trials and Tribulations


Merhaba, mutlu Kasım!  It’s Thursday, November 4th and this could only mean one thing; the Taylor’s survived our first Turkish Halloween.  Okay, maybe this doesn’t come as a huge surprise to you all but regardless Halloween in Turkey was a great time.  The streets were full of spooky trick-or-treaters, as well as a few Turkish children who wanted to join in on the festivites.  I’m not sure they quite understood the purpose of Halloween; mainly because they showed up at our door without costumes, or a bag for their candy.  Rather, a bright smile with their hands held out.  But lets not get ahead of ourselves. 

I thought I would share the full Halloween experience, which for us include the creation of the costume itself. What a fun experience with some unexpected twists and turns... 

My good friend Amanda is the proud owner of a brand-spanking-new Singer sewing machine.  We were so excited to put this fine peice of machinery to work we could hardly wait to get it threaded.  I am not sure how many of my readers have tried to thread a sewing machine; but I had not.  The instruction manual was vauge, confusing, and ultimately little help. 

Assembly day 1 was successful to the point of taking the intimidating machine out of the box and getting a good look at it.  We did figure out how to attach the foot pedal, so that was a huge plus. 

Assembly day 2 was incredibally frustrating and about equally successful.  We did manage the thread the bobbin (kind of) and make a few practice hems.   We were doing somthing wrong though, because the fabric wouldn’t “move”.  It just stayed in one place, and the material wouldn’t feed!  So frustrating.

Assembly day 3; if at first you don’t succeed, try try again.  This my friends was the golden day.  We figured out that the dog-stitch was activated, so the machine was set to monogram instead of auto-feed.  Also, the instructions failed to tell us that there were TWO spools of thread required to operate the machine, not one.  Apparently this was such common knowledge, there was no point in mentioning this.  I do not have any common knowledge in the art of sewing.  Zero.  Well, maybe now I do since I now know there needs to be two spools.  Once we got this figured out, the complete sewing portion of the costume took about 20 minutes.  I’m not sure which aspect was more frustrating; the first two days we couldn’t figure anything out, or the fact that after all that it was so simple and easy.  Here is a visual sequence of events of the process:


This is the "base-dress".  We measured the length and width, but didn't take into consideration the head-hole.  Whoops.  Nothing some scissors can't fix. 

My helpers, Kerisa and Arion.  They were our dancing entertainment for the night.


Pinning the seams, getting ready to sew! (Note, my cheerleaders in the back)

Working hard!


The fruits of our labor!  Spook-tastic!

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