Holey rusted metal, Batman!

w00t.

Behold! The Pillow O' Crap:


What is this you ask? Ah, it is a "pillow" full of crap. Fabric crap to be exact. But why would this make me all excited? Well, friends, it is because this PoC was made by a sewing machine. And it is literally the very first thing I have ever done on a sewing machine.

Let me state that I have never used a sewing machine until today, so this is a monumental achievement. Yesterday I bought a Sewing 101 book and read through it before bed. Today I bought thread and a cheap sewing machine (Brother XL-2600). And after a very frustrating hour of trying to thread the dang thing, I finally got it to make its first stitch! Then I proceeded to cut up a spare piece of fabric which I then straight-stitched together!

My first attempts were horrible. I couldn't even sew in a straight line. The feed dogs (yes, I learned that term yesterday too) I thought would have given a little more resistance, but nooooooooo... Actually there's a lot of lateral movement in it so I ended up with this really weird wavy line. Then I played around with the controls and got a bunch of other interesting stitches out of the machine.

Next I cut off a larger piece of fabric and then sewed a 5/8" allowance (yay! another new term!) on 3 sides of the irregularly-shaped fabric. Then I decided what the heck, so I packed up all the little scraps of thread and pieces of cloth and shoved them inside the "pillow", then sewed the final seam shut. And observe the fine zigzag crapsmanship. Observe!


So, my very first "project" is complete! Yay!

But there's more!

I did another quick test run and figured out how to basically make the usual "knife edge pillow" by sewing the seam on the inside-out fabrics. And if you look closely you can actually see the original PoC stuffed inside this second pillow:


...

OK, I know you're not totally impressed here, but you'll see what will happen in 1 week from now if I can really get the hang of this machine!!!
Yayyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!! :)