Episode: 2124
Title: HPR2124: Repairing a Cloth Shopping Bag with a Sewing Machine
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2124/hpr2124.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:36:49

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This is HPR episode 2,124 entitled, repairing a clockshopping pad with a sewing machine.
It is hosted by John Culp and is about 21 minutes long.
The summary is, I talk while sewing the strap back onto a clockshopping pad.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
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Hey everybody, this is John Culp in Lafayette, Louisiana.
I'm going to try to record a quick podcast before I go to work today.
Sadly the air conditioner just turned on, so I hope that doesn't make the recording too noisy.
Using my phone again with the $2 microphone.
So the project today is lately I've been doing a lot of, listen along while I fix something or overhaul something or change the oil, that kind of thing.
Today it's going to be fixing a shopping bag where the strap has come off.
I'm going to use a sewing machine to reattach it.
I have here a genome sewing machine and a nice blue carrying case.
I've already taken a picture of that.
Open up the bag and pull the sewing machine out.
First of all I'm going to get the AC adapter and pedal out of here.
There we go.
The pedal goes on the floor.
Of course you control the speed of the sewing machine with the pedal.
I don't know how many of y'all out there would ever have used a sewing machine, but I promise you as a hacker, as a do it yourself or this is one of the, it's a really useful skill to have.
And I'm thankful that I am my mother's son.
My mom was an expert seamstress.
She grew up poor and when she wanted to have new clothes a lot of time she had to make them herself.
So it looks like the presser foot came off.
She taught me, I don't know if she taught my brother too, but I don't know really where that stands with him.
But anyway, I learned how to sew when I was a kid.
She taught me the basic principles of it and how to thread the machine, how to do the bob end and that kind of thing.
So, and then also when I was in junior high school, I took a home economics class and we had to learn to cook a few things.
And we also had to do a sewing project.
We made a duffel bag.
And my duffel bag turned out pretty well.
After one kind of embarrassing part where I, when I was putting in the zipper, I accidentally sewed the two sides of the bag together.
And I had to get the seam ripper out and undo the damage.
Get pretty familiar with the seam ripper when you're a newbie at sewing.
Very useful tool allows you to undo the damage that you have done.
Plug in the thing and turn it on.
It's got a little bit of a light here to shine a light on what you're doing.
I also normally like to wear an LED headlamp when I'm sewing, not like I do it all the time or anything.
My skill at sewing basically extends to like emergency crude repairs.
I don't do anything elegant.
I basically can fix something and make it useful again even if my repair is kind of ugly.
So right now it looks like I'm actually pretty lucky here because the color of thread that's already in the machine is dark.
The bag that I'm trying to repair is brown.
I took a picture of that as well.
And so this repair actually might not look too bad because I promise you, if there had been some like really wrong color of thread in here, I would not have bothered to change it.
I mean, that's not part of my deal.
I use whatever thread is in there.
And if it doesn't look good, that's just too bad.
I just want to fix it so that the strap on this shopping bag is secure again.
So the sewing machine I have is one that my mom bought for me and the wife years ago, a dozen years ago maybe.
And it's a Genome Jim Silver, a 20th 25th anniversary edition.
Apparently it's got the stamp of approval of the American Sewing Guild.
I'll take a picture of it here.
Now that I've got it out of the carrying case.
And it comes with, I guess my mom bought for me a little sewing, like an improvised little sewing table to put whatever you're working on.
It's a plexiglass thing that slides up and around so that you've got a nice surface to work on.
You could mount a sewing machine like this in a sewing desk, I suppose.
But I don't have one of those. We don't have space in the house to keep something like that out.
This is always just in the top of the wife's closet.
And if I need it, I get it out. If I don't, it stays in the closet.
Now one of the first things to do right now is to re-thread.
I think it's mostly threaded the right way where I've got to put the thread back around there at the needle.
And then kind of lick the tip of the thread a little bit and then try to stick it through the needle.
Because it looks like it came out.
There's actually a little gizmo to thread the needle, but normally I don't need it.
I don't really understand how it works either. Maybe I should try it.
How does that thing work?
I have to take off my glasses to see.
We get an old man. I use these bifocal.
We try to put the thread through the eye of the needle.
It is so small that it can be very hard to see.
Well, the air conditioner turned off.
I'm still trying to get it through.
Oops, that might have got it.
Come on, go through there.
Just get it to go through.
I can finish this job in a matter of minutes.
Yes, I think I got it.
Okay.
I did it. I got the thread through the needle.
Oh, how exciting.
Oops, I don't want to turn and pull it into a knot there.
Oh, no. What have I done?
I've got to get the thread to go through the needle from the front to the back
and then go down through the presser foot and out the back side of that.
I'm going to make sure I don't tie it into a knot accidentally.
Oh, boy. What a pain in the rear.
This is nothing compared to the bobbin.
What I'm so happy about right now is that I don't have to deal with the bobbin thread.
The thread that comes out the bottom, it's this tiny spool that goes underneath.
Oh, my heart sinks if I open up the sewing machine and realize that I really need to thread a bobbin
because I hate doing that part of the problem.
It's the kind of thing my mom can do in a jiffy, but I always have to look up how to do it again.
I have to get out the user's manual and you know, okay, I'm all set.
Okay, well, the line share of the work is done, I think.
So now I'm going to grab my bag that needs to repair.
I'll take a look out of here so the thread has come out along the strap.
I guess the first thing I'm going to do is pull out the old thread that's still kind of hanging around.
I wonder if I should just rip everything all the way off and start completely fresh.
My tendency is not to do that.
It's going to look a little bit ugly, but this doesn't concern me a great deal.
I need the little thread slippers looking the sewing basket.
I can get these tiny little snippers, these kind of scissors.
I think they're just called snippers.
There's the seam ripper.
There's the pin cushion. There are the snippers.
Okay, you can't see them, but actually maybe I'll take a picture of them.
And you can hear them now, listen.
Makes a nice sound, huh?
So now I'm going to take a picture of the snippers.
I'll put the snippers up next to the presser foot.
Maybe you can see the bobbin in there too.
I'm going to turn off this light, let it help.
There.
There.
There are the snippers.
I'm not sure exactly how sewing machines work, but there's thread coming from the top and thread coming from the bottom.
And somehow they go through the cloth and make a loop around each other and knot each other up and make everything nice and secure.
Don't ask me how, because I really don't know.
But it works as if by magic, and you can easily fix things that way.
Like I said, I'm not very good at this, but I've got enough skill where in a pinch I can do a repair.
And I actually, I made myself a costume one time.
The orchestra director where I teach, you know, I direct a school of music and performing arts.
And every year, right around Halloween, the orchestra has its annual Halloween concert.
And sometimes they enlist the help of various faculty from the department to play out little sketches.
And either last year or the year before, I was invited to play the role of Barney Rubble in a sketch.
And I made my own costume. I went to Goodwill, I bought a big brown sheet.
And then I cut it up and sewed it into a garment that looked pretty much like Barney Rubble's.
And it was fine.
Costuming faculty loaned me a wig, because of course I'm bald, I don't have any hair like Barney has.
So I wore this wig, I had the costume I made myself, I felt pretty good about myself making a costume like that.
Alright, so now the tricky bit is to, I think I'm going to pin this actually.
I could try to sew it on there without pinning it, but in order for the sake of security, it's probably best to pin it into place.
And that way it won't be moving all around.
The difficulty with doing a bag is that you got to make sure that you don't sew one side of the bag to the other.
And thereby invalidate, you know, invalidate, like pretty much disable the bag to do its job, which is the whole thing.
Okay, there's one pin, I think I'll put maybe just one more.
This job doesn't have to look very good, it just needs to hold.
So I'll put one pin up toward the top of the bag and another one down here, a little bit toward the middle.
I'll take a picture of the strap pinned into place.
Oh, isn't this exciting.
Okay, so there's the strap.
Oops, should I turn it this way?
And that looks good.
Okay, strap is pinned into place.
Now, what I have to do is figure out how to make this go where I want it to.
You sometimes have to turn these things into very awkward positions to get them under the presser foot in such a way where you can sew your line and not sew one side to the other.
I think I can do it.
I'm going to shove this under there, like so.
Once you get it under there in position, you have to lower the presser foot.
And that clamps right down.
You want to be sure your fingers aren't under there because it'll hurt your finger.
You got to lower the presser foot.
Now, it's all clamped down under there.
And now, I cross my fingers and hope that as soon as I start this up, the thread doesn't come out of its place and immediately start tying knots.
This happens sometimes.
And I never know why.
I just assume it's because of my inexperience.
So, in the first part of this, I'm going to do what's called, my mom call it a lock stitch or something where you go forward a little bit and then you back up right over it and then go forward again to lock all the stitches into place.
There's a little lever on here that when you push it down, it makes the sewing machine go in reverse.
And so, I'll push that down after I've gone a half an inch or an inch or something.
I might even go back and forth two or three times just to make it really strong.
Again, this does not have to look good. It just needs to hold.
So, make sure everything is not all bunched up.
And here we go.
Backwards, forwards, backwards again, and then forwards.
Okay, so I've started.
I'm going to pull out the first pin.
You've got to pull out the pins as you go along.
Uh-oh, I think I might have gotten myself into a pickle here.
We'll see.
One of the straps is kind of coming around the front of the presser foot in a way where at some point I'm going to run out of space and have to back my way out.
I don't know how it's going to work.
I'm going to try just to keep going.
Okay, going right down the line here.
I've gotten all the way down to the next pin.
I'll pull that one out now.
And keep on going.
Okay, so now I've paused just for a sec with the needle stuck all the way down in there.
I'm going to raise the presser foot while the needle is still engaged and make a 90 degree turn to start going back the other way on this thing.
90 degree turn.
So I'm going to, it's like I'm making a giant U-shaped stitch on this thing.
I've gone from the top of the bag down about three-fourths of the way to the point where the stitching was still good on the strap.
And so now I've turned 90 degrees counterclockwise, put the presser foot back down and I'm going to go across horizontally now.
Now I've stopped again with the needle stuck in there.
I'm going to see if I can keep turning it around.
Now is where there's a whole bunch of part of the bag that's stuffed up under the thing and the strap is starting to get in the way.
I'm going to take a picture of this thing to illustrate the predicament that I might be in here.
I don't know if I'm going to be able to get out of this or not. We'll see.
So now I've turned another 90 degrees. I need to lower the presser foot again and start going back up the other side of the strap.
I'll see if I can keep this side of the strap out of the way.
Okay, here we go.
So far so good.
I'm going to write up the line.
I think I'm going to make it go.
Okay, I'm nearly at the very top now.
And once I get up to the top, I'm going to do that reverse and forward trick a couple of times again to lock the stitches in place.
I'll use the little, there's a wheel on the right hand side to do fine movement of the needle up and down.
I've turned it a little bit towards myself to raise the needle to the highest position.
Pick up the presser foot again and now gently try to pull my work out the back side of the sewing machine.
So now it's completely out the back and I've got the thread from the top and the thread from the bobbin kind of stretching out here and I'm going to cut it off.
Now it releases the bag and now I've got my strap firmly reattached.
Oh, how satisfying.
Look at that.
That's a good hacker that knows how to use a sewing machine to repair a bag.
What do you think of that?
Okay, so now I'm going to take a picture of the bag with the strap reattached.
That looks a little bit ugly, but you know, I've done this enough times now where even my ugly ones are not too bad.
And then you got to clip off the excess thread at the seams, you know, where you started and stopped to make it look a little bit neater.
Okay, and one more.
I think that's all the little threads.
It looks like the thread is a little bit kind of knotted up coming out of a bobbin area, but I think I've got it now.
I made one from the top and one from the bottom.
Yeah, okay.
So I'm going to cut that off to you.
Which one is it?
There.
So the sewing machine is back.
The way it needs to be.
My bag is fixed, and now I'm going to take a picture of it.
Oh, so exciting.
So now a picture of the newly sewn strap.
It says to hold the device steady while taking pictures.
I'm going to check that and make sure it is not too blurry.
Yeah, looks good.
Okay, I think I'm done here, y'all.
This has been John Culp for Hacker Public Radio with a little sewing project.
I won't talk to you guys some other time.
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