At the risk of sounding like I’m obsessing, this is one more post about my ailing industrial Bernina, aka Wild Thing. Wild Thing had been losing much of her old zip, to the point where I thought I may have to rename her, perhaps to Old Thing. Not that I don’t identify with the feeling. We all have our ups and downs. She’d been failing in areas of thread breakage and stitch timing. She emitted a funny shriek at the start of each session and her bran new belt was rubbing against the wood table groove, filling the air with the dark rubbery scent of poor health. How to bring back the happy hum of perfect gears and belts, that vitamin shot, that kick in the … pants?
Enter Ricardo! Ricardo is from Panama. A short stocky smiling Spanish gentleman bearing all the tools of his trade in a deceptively small red metal box. Ricardo, who called back yesterday within an hour, and asked if I was a morning person. Because he could drop by after taking his wife to work… at 7:30 am tomorrow morning. Now I didn’t tell him this, but I would gladly have got up at 4:00 am – heck, I would have stayed up all night – for the joy of having someone look at my baby.
To make a long story short, in his capable hands Ricardo had soon cracked open the long neglected motor, cleaned it up, checked under the hood, made various fine adjustments, liberated gears with generous dollops of oil, and walked away at half the price I would eagerly have paid for his services, all while laughing up a storm at his own stories. Perhaps I should hesitate to say this, seeing how easily one can get in trouble on blogs, but the depth of feeling a seamstress has for her machine repairman can not be underestimated. I have fallen in love. Let’s leave it at that.
Wild Thing awaits me now, as I gather my creative flow, in anticipation of trouble and interruption-free stitching. Now if only Ricardo could do computers too!
Tags: sewing machines, studio work