E G O S P E W

I was most excited about my wife’s and my recent decision to purchase a fancy new sewing machine. This has been an item of her desire for a long time and I fully support acquiring the tools to make her happy. (Though I am not so dim as to buy her, say,  a vacuum cleaner for her birthday.  We tend to both get excited over Dysons and I realize I would be getting it as much for me as her.)

She is incredibly artistic and handy and can knit or crochet absolutely anything in about two episodes of Dexter. (Offered into evidence: Teddy bears Campbell Brown and Lynley, knit from scratch.)  When we lived in Brooklyn she used to actually knit bullet-proof vests for the officers in the local precinct. (That kevlar yarn was a beast to work with. She had to special-order 9-millimeter teflon-coated armor-piercing needles.)  It’s impossible to calculate how many lives she must have saved over those harsh winters.

It became a friendly game that whenever I brought up the concept of acquiring a Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle, she would idly and codependently mention the fancy sewing machine. She apparently equated both items expensewise, and indeed I had no problem spending an equivalent amount on a Super-Duper Sewing Computer that she would coax to weave colorful rugs and darn life-size presidential portraits and such. But the model she wanted was much more modest. In reality the Ninja (itself a very modest 250cc) would cost about 10 times the Singer. Talk about a guilt trip.

Anyway, now the Singer has arrived, and I assume I have the Ninja green light, which coincidentally, is the desired color! Yay!

(Important Note to Wife and Sister and Concerned Readers: Relax. The above paragraph employed poetic license purely for entertainment purposes. There is no money for silly dangerous toys. I am not running out to buy a motorcycle anytime soon. Likely never.) Unyay. 

The Big Day

We opened the carton together, with equal anticipation. Oh-boy, oh-boy, oh-boy! You know, it’s programmable with little patterns, and that’s a big turn-on.

I expect to benefit from it right out of the box. This highly intelligent Singer should automatically sew on all those nasty little buttons for my button-down collar shirts that I wore to my software engineering manager job all those years. I don’t know if I am especially hard on my buttons, feverishly checking all final details of habiliment during my morning routine on the subway, but they seem to loosen and disappear at a furious rate; I’m sure they were surreptitiously collected by the folks at Happy Cleaners and recycled for their melamine content.

Not that I actually wear shirts with buttons any more since I lead a so-called life of leisure (i.e. unceasing house maintenance in preparation for a B&B business and a life of changing beds). We moved away from the big city and I’ve severed my corporate ball and chain. T-shirts and cotton sweaters are my preferred upper-body covering. And I can’t remember the last time I changed into a dress shirt for my daily nap. Still, it will be good to have all my shirts fully button-enabled, should I ever need them again.

Latest/Greatest

My wife’s previous machine, packed far and deep in the garage, is a very old Singer Zigzag model, which I remember being touted as radical technology when it first appeared. I was captivated by TV ads showing the blur of its needle bobbing up and down and swinging side to side like Cassius Clay, spewing out impossibly complex patterns . . . for instance a Button Hole or the eponymous Zigzag Stitch. I think that was all it did, actually. But that was a lot in those days. I fantasized about the complex of shafts and cogs and eccentrics required to produce such beauty. Not one atom of silicon was harmed in the making of this totally mechanical marvel.

I gather, looking at the Singer History page, that this was in the mid-sixties and the machine was from the “Touch and Sew” line. What brilliant advanced technology and forward-looking design it embraced, with extra levers to control its zigginess, a thread spool that mounted sideways (which looked sweet but kinda bothered me topologically, in that it must tighten or loosen the inherent twist in the thread as it fed over the end of the spool), all packaged in a streamlined case with a drag coefficient of 0.3.

Singer actually first produced a model that zagged way back in 1952. It looked just like my mother’s big old black White, a scary cast iron beast that was never intended to zag nor zig, which I used to mess with as a kid and always get jammed and tangled and generally came way too close to sewing my fingers together on. (Believe it or not, these earlier, curvier, models achieved sub-0.25 drag numbers [top spool dismounted] in extensive wind tunnel testing.)

But here we are already, in the New Millennium. Come and gone are the periodic high-tech breakthrough models from the Labs of Singer, named and ballyhooed by the whiz kids in Marketing:

• 1975 “Athena 2000”
• 1978 “Touchtronic 2001”
• 1990 “9900 Unlimited”
• 1996 “Millennium Series”
• 1997 “Quantum XL-1000”
• 2001 “Super-SewBot ¡Infinity!”

(Ha, I made that last one up.)

But these advances of eras past are mere protozoan prologue to this marvelous mechanimal of uppermost evolutionary sophistication.  Thus, I give you:

The 2008 Singer 7470 Confidence Electronic Sewing Machine!

Overview

Where do I start? It would be quicker to list what it cannot do. Let’s look at some detailed illustrations from the actual user’s manual.

Feature Profusion, Pattern Plethora

Most importantly, this is definitely a sewing machine for dog lovers, amongst which please count me. First, there is a “Feed Dog Control” (#17 in the above diagram) which, by the look of it, automatically ejects Puppy Chow pellets when you are deep into the late hours of an all-night sewing project, best friend patiently lying on your feet.

In addition, a Dog pattern (#18 from the table, right) is the only actual vertebrate available from its superregnum of stitches (take that, Cat Sewers and Linnaeus Lovers).

Invertebrates, interestingly, are better represented:

• #16 Bacteriophage virus
• #17 Hydra
• #20 E.coli, conjugating

All you astrophysicist/sewing buffs are not left in outer space.  You’ll be warmed by:

• #19 Solar prominence.

Of course, who wrote the program software but embedded controller nerds? And as nerds are wont to do, many a subtle digital pun has been inserted.  Scanning the stitch grupos below, you will find all the nerdpopular oscilloscope traces such as sine, triangle, and square waves.  There are some nice hypercycloids and their variants. Clearly an H.G. Wells fan programmed stitch #01 Martian.  And do you have any doubt that, if you just got the right key combo, a sweet Easter egg supersequence would grab your silk scarf and emblazon on it a hieroglyphic rendition of that wacky Star Trek episode, you know which one I mean, where the birdoids with the funny doojiggers fly in from stardate 7322 but were really Egyptian Pharaohs?

Quantum Teleportation

The Singer couldn’t be more useful to the modern technologist.  Look at this Tacking Stitch Function, with its dedicated button:

The manual describes its usefulness to avoid the [un]raveling of pattern stitches.  Clearly, as their illustration suggests, it couldn’t be more perfect for representing the recently demonstrated process of, using a light beam, teleporting the quantum identity of one atom to another a few feet away. If you have ever felt like you were in two places at the same instant, tied together by a mere thread, this is the sewing machine for you. A stitch in time, and all that.

Ultimate Convenience Features

Let’s return to those little touches that separate this Singer from mere monotones.  Coffee filters are inserted in the Accessory Box (#6 in “Knowing Your Sewing Machine” illustration, above), which also provides a retractable ashtray. Water is added via the top port (#10). The swing-out Cup Holder (#47) can handle full or demitasse. Incidentally, the cappuccino setting provides a product DeLonghi would die for. Kudos, Singer!

Conclusion

There’s much more to report on with the marvelous and talented Singer 7470. As my wife spins her magic webs, we’ll certainly document its strengths and weaknesses. Suffice to say, Singer has outdone itself and this is a fantastic machine, even if we haven’t actually plugged it in yet.