When Dom was visiting this summer, he asked me to sew up a seam on one of his soccer jerseys. For some reason, my sewing machine just wouldn't do it. I was pretty surprised since I've sewn some pretty tough materials on it, but I thought maybe these newfangled rubber-like polyesters were finally too much for my 1940s Singer.
Today I sat down for a few minutes to sew some darts in a knit top I bought for tango, and ran into the same problem. Sewing machine would not sew this stuff. Everything seemed fine--the tension was right, it was oiled. I sewed a line of stitches on a test piece of cotton. Perfect. But it wouldn't do the knit. Hmmm.
For some reason, as I was fooling with threading the needle yet again after the thread had broken, I thought: is the needle in backwards? Does it even matter? There's a right way to put the needle in, but it's not obvious which way is the right way and the instruction book is so old that I put it somewhere in a "safe place" 10 years ago and...well, haven't looked at it recently. I unscrewed the needle, turned it around, screwed it back in, and tried again. Perfect stitches.
So, it wasn't Dom's shirt, and it wasn't my machine, it was that I've been sewing with the needle in backwards for...how long? It's a wicked good thing that I'm not tempted to take this as some kind of metaphor for my life. Yessah.