Like many males, I'm sartorially challenged. When I was a teenager, even my father had to take me aside to tell me that getting around like a hobo when in 'good' company or going out wasn't the best of ideas (my mother had long given up). Later, the Army had ways of forcing the issue which were very effective (the training not only sank in but also it's stuck and withstood the test of time). It also taught us all how to use a needle-and-thread to do minor repairs and to sew buttons back on (but I already knew this as I'd had to do it many times when I was a kid).

So why my interest in sewing machines? Well, nowadays it's more a pragmatic/practical interest as they're rather useful to even someone like me. When I was a kid, I'd use my mother's sewing machine to sew all sorts of stuff such as cardboard and thin sheets of plastic for my experiments when my mother wasn't looking (meaning that she was away from home whenever I used it). If she had caught me then I've have been in deep shit. (I need to add my that mother was a whiz at making clothes; she even made some of her best going-out attire and it was excellent, so her sewing machine was her pride-and-joy—not something for number one son to smash, that being a 'skill' of which I was exceeding good at.)

Little wonder then that she always knew whenever I'd been at it, but (to my knowledge) she never knew what tortures I'd put the machine through†. It seems her not knowing the details softened things a bit. Somehow, the forensic evidence was always the tension knob, it seems no matter how hard I tried to set it back in the position where she'd left it I never quite managed it. I reckon there was other stuff too, such as the position of threads and the amount of cotton in the shuttle but I always restocked that back to how I found it.

Now to the present. In this liberated age, I have been completely unsuccessful in getting women in my life to even go shopping with me for clothes so that I look respectable let alone repairing and mending my torn and thread-worn stuff (I am however the fortunate owner of many extremely well knitted pullovers, apparently that's an interest or a hobby and the sewing machine is not). So these days I've the machine all to myself—and I can now sew anything on it I like including cardboard (right, I still use it for stitching all sorts of odd things).

I can't say that I enjoy repairing and mending clothes, in fact, I'll put off doing it until I really have to. That said, I can make a pretty good job of it from the fact that I'd become somewhat expert on my mother's machine decades ago. Taking up jeans and other pants—no problem (you'd never know it wasn't factory-done); making properly-stitched buttonholes—no problem (I'm now expert at replacing that damn Velcro that clogs up in the wash with fluff and becomes useless with real buttons); inserting patches—no problem (I can even match the insert so that it all but looks invisible except close up), and I can even repair pockets and extent their depth.

The things I can't do or won't do unless I'm really desperate—i.e.: when the shops are shut and I can't buy another pair and such—are replacing fly zips and letting out and taking in pants' wastes. They're jobs that are too fiddly and time-consuming, I've not the patience to first tack things up then readjust where necessary. In summary, it's useful skill that all males ought to know these days given that our partners usually will tell us to go take a jump if we ask them to do it. Moreover, it's all the more important that we just don't throw away clothes at the first sign of wear and tear due to environmental reasons (growing cotton is hugely demanding on resources, especially water—remember the Aral Sea catastrophe?).

As for sewing machines themselves, I reckon they're truly wonderful ingenious mechanical contraptions (and that includes overlockers which I've also used). Their invention by
Elias Howe and others has to be one of the greatest of all time given the millions upon millions of hour's toil they have saved over the last one and half plus centuries.

It seems to me that with the ever-increasing environmental crisis from growing fiber, that the not-so-humble sewing machine ought to make a comeback and again take pride-of-place in our homes as it did in our grandmothers' day.

† When in primary school, I accidentally happened to smash one of the peddle-driven sewing machines that the girls in my class trained on (fortunately, it was a coed school). When not in use the machines were lined up along a corridor wall and one day I decided to show other boys how fast I could peddle one—a skill well practiced on my grandmother's machine without incident. Anyway, at full revs the cast iron peddle snapped and broke away from its connecting rod with an almighty bang. All the onlooking boys scattered and did disappearing acts in record time leaving me with much egg on my face so to speak.