Week 5: In which our hero gives herself a Serging headache.

This past week I decided to finally confront my brand new serger sewing machine. It was a very generous Christmas gift from Sistah Knittah, and it's been sitting on my dining room table ever since, quietly waiting. I have several gigantic t-shirts (compliments of The Ostrich) that I've been meaning to tweak into cute little tops for myself, so I started with a quadruple-extra-large ARME shirt. (Note: The width of this shirt - armpit to armpit - was about 25 inches. To fit me, I would have to get that down to 15). I had no trouble threading the sucker (thanks to the extremely thorough Serger Essentials class I took at The Workroom in the Spring), though figuring out the right tension took an embarrassingly long time. I'm happy to say that after about forty-five minutes of fiddling, I'm now quite confident in twirling the many various knobs around to get the stitches to sit just right. What followed, however, was a complete disaster. For starters, being the impatient moron that I am, I didn't bother measuring anything, but simply placed a nice fitting tank-top on top of the t-shirt, and cut around it. I thought it would just be a matter of serging the sides shut and finishing the arm holes, who knew this could be so tricky?! Anyway, I can still wear the "altered" shirt, but only under a very bulky sweater. Successful serging will definitely require more work. I guess the humongous Wu-Tang shirt I brought back from the Rock the Bells show in NYC a couple of summers ago will have to wait to be transformed into the cute little top with puffed sleeves that I've been dreaming of. Oh well.