Multipurpose sewing machine?

This was originally posted on September 22, 2005. It cost $130 to fix.

Multi-purpose ... sewing machine??

If you had asked me the primary purpose of my trusty old Viking sewing machine yesterday, I would have looked at you a little oddly, and then answered that it was meant for sewing. Mostly I've sewn clothes for my kids, aside from some maternity clothes for myself (including a well-intentioned but unfortunately patterned summer dress with little green frogs that turned out to be a lot ... well, greener after the dress was made). If I had to think of a secondary purpose, I probably would have mentioned its ability to produce bad language, as evidenced by the first and last project I did using stretchy fleece.

I haven't done any sewing for quite a while. My creativity goes in spurts -- some months it seems to dry up completely, and other times it goes in cycles, running through the now-predictable pastimes of sewing, hand-quilting, cross-stitch, baking, scrapbooking, and the odd fling with hand-dipped chocolates. Then some months it runs riot, and it's all I can do to keep up with the drive to write-music-write-stories-sew-clothes-invent-recipes before all the creative energy threatens to tear me to bits.

Recently, I've been writing a bit, but it's been a dry spell on the whole. However, Peter has grown out of his pajamas, and I had two pairs cut out on the sewing table from the last round of sewing madness, so it was becoming unavoidable. I located matching thread, plugged in the iron, replaced the needle, sighed, and started in.

Now, you have to understand that in the months when I wasn't using the sewing machine, Peter was. Not for its intended purpose, naturally, but for purposes only known to the mind of Peter and occasionally shared with the rest of us. The most comprehensible was "cooking". He would turn on the sewing machine light (just like Mommy turns on the range light when she cooks), prepare all his ingredients (also like Mommy, but with rather more plastic and less pasta), and carefully arrange them on the flat bottom section of the machine. He would painstakingly cook his little plastic knight, seasoning him with cardboard game pieces if Mommy was watching, and her good-quality pins if she wasn't.

Naturally, the production of flannel pajamas required the dismantling of the cooking operation. I expected Peter to be upset about this, but the cool pictures of footballs on the flannel seemed to balance the loss. I started to sew, and as I got into the rhythm of it again, I remembered how very much I like to sew. Peter was playing quietly, the fabric was moving smoothly and confidently beneath my hands, and the sewing machine itself was emitting a cheerful jingle.

Jingle? That's odd. Usually it's more of a hum. Oh, well, it still works, and I wonder if it's really going to make that big a difference if I use dark purple thread instead of dark blue on a section that isn't going to show, and oh, didn't that line up nicely ... and I forgot about the jingle.

Right up until there was a big noise and a small explosion, and a protective plate broke and dropped clean out of the machine followed by two pennies. Apparently the machine had an extra, hidden purpose: Piggy bank.

You know ... they didn't mention this in What To Expect When You're Expecting.