How difficult could it be? Honestly. I bought curtains and rod both at Target. People of widely diverse IQs shop there. Certainly I have the brains for this project. And while yes, the rod installation required the use of a drill, I was undeterred. I have used a drill before. Countless Times. Heavens.
Still, it was great that Beth, who with her Olivia and Jack was spending the day with us, was willing to do this project with me. It wasn’t that I needed her help. I just wanted it in the way one wants company, in the way that doing things with Someone Else is, sometimes, just More Fun.
A simple project, yes? Hem and hang some new curtains for Emma Grace’s bedroom. Beth was willing. After complimenting me on the curtains (a Very Important detail, as Beth has an Eye For Style), she set about reading the directions for the hardware, and I set about finding our drill.
This was a bit of a challenge. I won’t go into the hazardous details of our cluttered and remote storage room (I did see one centipede); suffice it to say that I had a Hard Time finding the drill. And when I found it, it had no juice in the battery, which led to another hunt: finding a recharger. And then I had the hassle of trying to make the drill fit into the recharger, which led to my obvious next step: Borrow Drill from Neighbor. Which I promptly did.
Beth, having had Plenty of Time to read the directions during my drill pursuit, walked me through the mounting of the new and fancy curtain rod. We took turns walking across the bed and eyeballing the mount. I marked the places with a pencil because Beth refused (what if she put them in the wrong place so that the rod was hung all wrong and our friendship was irrevocably destroyed?), in no time at all Voila! We hung the rod perfectly above Emma Grace’s window and then proceeded to talk about the hemming.
Talking about hemming is important, especially if you don’t sew very often (that’d be me). When one is making a three-inch hem, one must actually measure seven inches, don’t you know. This can be confusing and even a little nail-biting when you have to cut Large Numbers of inches away from the curtain in the first place. And it gets even more nail-biting when you have to do two curtains the same way, so that they Match, because you spent $20.00 a pop for the curtains and you don’t want to mess one up and then go crawling back to Target to replace your ruined curtain. Moreover, you can’t.
But Beth saved me by eyeing the fabric with me, and talking me through the measuring, and teasing me through the cutting, and laughing while I ironed (oh, so carefully) my creases so that the hem would go in Just Right.
And then it was time to sew. This was going to be wonderful: curtains for Emma’s room, up in just one day! How lovely her room would look.
In eager anticipation, I even washed the windows.
I procured my portable sewing machine from its place, poured us each a glass of iced tea, and went to work. Just a long stitch at the bottom of each curtain, and the task would be complete. It would take No Time At All. But when it came to it, I think I sewed about four inches of one hem. Maybe five. Because the sewing machine, which worked Just Beautifully last week when I made repairs to my bedspread, decided to eat Emma’s curtains. Just Gnaw and Chew, Chew and Gnaw. Green gingham is, apparently, delicious.
Beth and I consulted the machine’s manual. Is it the tension? Upper or lower? The pressure? My, but this machine can make lots of adjustments! While I took to ripping out the tiny and voracious stitches in the curtain, Beth studied our options.
We turned dials, switched levers, threaded and threaded and threaded the machine. We tried stitches on a scrap of fabric and poured over the results: adjust the lower tension? Turn this dial to “12”? And we repeated the mantra (although we did not follow it): Never Remove the Bobbin. Because, really, why remove the bobbin? Just leave it in there, quietly tucked away in the darkness, where it can Do Its Job.
(And what in the world is a “bobbin” anyway?)
My bobbin refused to do its job. The whole machine, in fact, while sounding and looking busy, repeatedly faked us out. Tight stitches on the top layer of gingham disguised atrocious loops of thread on the reverse. Little pulls appeared in the fabric where none had been before. Thread came away from the machine, not in two strands as they are supposed to, but in a kind of cord. Or a rope, even.
We gave up. I pinned the hems and warned Emma away from them and hung them in the windows to pretend they were finished. What else could I do? I would wait it out until my mother comes at the end of the month. Mothers are always good for a rescue.
But Beth took home a scrap of fabric to try it on her machine. Maybe, she thought, her machine would not like to eat green gingham, but would stitch it up and spit it out the way we want it to. And if it does, then she will take these new curtains home to her house, where she will sew up the hems quite nicely, and rescue me Once Again.
Because that’s the way she is, don’t you know.
