Whadya Know? It Works!!!

The sewing saga continues. As many of you know, Joanne loves to sew.

When she was ten years old, Joanne’s mother taught her to sew on grandmother’s treadle machine. In September of 2009, forty-seven years later (when we first came to work with VSI in Tanzania) it did not take long for Joanne to assess the condition of the students’ uniforms and determine to help them. She started with a borrowed treadle sewing machine from a village tailor, mending torn garments and replacing broken zippers. It wasn’t long before she was making new uniform items: scarves, ties, trousers, skirts and shirts. Gary started making trips nearly monthly to the towns of Vwawa, Mlowoo and Mbeya to buy bolts of fabric.

When the time established for the borrowed machine expired and Steve Vinton saw the ministry being accomplished for the students, he bought Joanne a new treadle machine. The quality of machines available here, however, are much to be desired. She was constantly adjusting thread tensions or the bobbin or dealing with some other mechanical problem.

She decided in June of 2010 to bring her favorite machine (a Pfaff) from the States when we returned in September.

After promptly burning out the foot pedal using the electricity available from the diesel generator, we tried in vain to develop a treadle adaptation for the Pfaff; its machinery was just too stiff and heavy for the rope’s traction to turn the “wheel.”

One day a student gave us a car window crank that she’d found on the ground. We mounted the crank to a carved piece of wood and duct taped it to the wheel in order to turn the wheel manually. When we returned to the states in 2011, we had friends help us improve both the fitting of the wooden piece in the wheel and the quality of the window crank. (The initial crank was plastic, which wore out, the knob constantly coming off in the hand of the person “turning” for Joanne.) The joke around campus was that if you helped Bibi with her sewing, your arm would be either strong or aching.

As the time drew near for our return to the states in 2012, our thoughts turned again to converting the machine to a treadle operation. Some of Joanne’s favorite “turners” were busy with preparation for National Exams, so she was depending on Gary more and more to help out. Although he enjoyed the time together, it often interrupted other plans.

We returned to an earlier idea of using a bicycle chain to drive the wheel. Necessity is the mother of invention. We didn’t know if this had been done before, but we were certainly hoping to praise God for its success and the service it would bring to our beautiful students. In the states, we bought a pair of sprockets and chain.

Upon our return in September, we bought a used treadle cabinet,

cut and fitted a circular board to the wheel of the treadle for the mounting of the larger sprocket,

and mounted the smaller sprocket on the sewing machine’s wheel.

After some adjustments in the machine’s height and alignment and the chain’s length, the operation proved successful and Joanne became independent in her production. She estimates that she can sew nearly twice as fast as when someone was turning the wheel manually. She’s able to turn out two shirts in an evening.

Sewing seeds of kindness,

Gary and Joanne Grenell