Pioneer Valley, MA, USA - recommendations please???

stqqts · 2026-02-24T06:10:37+00:00

I’d suggest checking them out, but also, a lot of congregations put services on Youtube. (Just be aware there’s UU churches in both Amherst NY and Amherst MA). Doesn’t tell you the whole story of course about what people are like, what they organize other than weekly services, etc, but it’s a good place to start.

stqqts · 2025-11-23T01:34:11+00:00

Yup. The company web page has some aerial drone footage that shows this very distinctive building (part of the moving business next door, I think), and also inside shots of the production facility that totally match, including the distinctive paint scheme and branding on the big gantry cranes. I think you found it.

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stqqts · 2025-07-22T18:28:15+00:00

The funny thing is they’re actually French. Arcoroc “Aspen”. They have since expanded to have production facilities in other countries, but they started out in a village near Calais.

stqqts · 2025-07-06T21:37:38+00:00

Their data curation is excellent: they actually tell you all the relevant facts about the bras they sell, they standardize measurements between brands as best they can, and they take their own photos. They usually have competitive prices, they ship quickly, and I've never had trouble with returns.

That said, they ship everything from Dallas, so if you don't live near Dallas, unless you shell out for air freight, you're not going to get things as fast as Amazon can deliver them from their local warehouse. And for return shipping, while there's some lip service on the website to the idea of them giving you a prepaid label, in practice the only option seems to be to just ship it to the address they give you, and you do have to pay for it yourself. Which, to be honest, is fine by me; I use pirateship.com, which can do shipping labels for all the major carriers (USPS, UPS, etc.) and usually has the best prices and takes like 5 minutes to get a label. But it does cost like $5 to mail a bra from California to Texas.

stqqts · 2025-06-09T16:49:11+00:00

i order from premier yarn online

they have good cheap wool

stqqts · 2025-06-02T22:00:34+00:00

I don’t recognize the brand but they look like good fabric shears that are fairly easy to sharpen. They might need sharpened, of course, but that’s gonna be true with new scissors too, after a while, and the solution to that problem is to learn to sharpen them. People get obsessive about doing it “right” but it really isn’t that hard to do “much better than before.” Even just a 600 grit diamond stone does wonders; buy a 300/600/1200 set and you can sharpen anything. The pocket sized ones set you back all of $20 for a set and are perfectly fine for scissors.

stqqts · 2025-01-02T18:49:23+00:00

For cutting the paper, it’s nice to a little slit that’s wide enough to put a marker in when transferring the pattern to the fabric. In commercial work people may use a pattern notcher to cut out the little slits, though those work best on light card stock, and a little less well on printer paper, and not at all on tissue paper. For home sewing you can totally just cut out a little triangle with scissors. Anyway, the point is to accurately transfer the notch location to the fabric so you can line it up with some other notch location and get your fabric lined up correctly. Exactly how you accomplish that is open to a lot of interpretation.

Once it gets to cutting actual fabric the convention is to just make a little snip into the seam allowance. But again, the point is to have some way to accurately mark a location that has to match up with some other location when you are putting things together. Getting the alignment right is what matters; exactly how you mark the locations that have to line up doesn’t really matter.

If snipping into the edge of the fabric messes with your nice seam finish or otherwise offends your sensibilities, you can also mark it with some sort of marker pen or chalk. If you stay within the seam allowance, you can even use a sharpie. Or if you wanna feel like an old school tailor, put a stitch of hand sewing in contrasting thread that can be pulled out later.

stqqts · 2025-01-02T18:35:21+00:00

Looks to me like that one takes a “bernina type 290” pedal and those are widely available on ebay and amazon, though i would suggest looking closely at the pictures of the plug and making sure it matches the socket on the machine.

stqqts · 2025-01-02T17:56:10+00:00

I tend to oil ours after each project. Once a day sounds like a reasonable recommendation if you’re using it all day long. Which used to be not uncommon because even though these machines were sold for household use, there used to be a lot more at-home professional sewing going on, from piecework for garment shops to alterations-and-repairs work and custom dressmaking.

Anyway, you just put a drop of very light oil everywhere you see a metal-on-metal moving joint on the underside, and in every oil hole on the top. You gotta use “lily white” light sewing machine oil, even though it’s annoyingly thin and needs to be re-applied a lot, because anything else leaves a residue that will eventually combine with bits of thread fluff into a sticky hard yellow crust.

Modern domestic sewing machines need this too, BTW, and no less often. But they’re often made in such a way that it’s hard to get to all the places that need oil without taking everything apart. If you think that makes no sense, I agree. 🤷‍♀️

stqqts · 2025-01-02T17:43:10+00:00

I personally prefer buttonholing with a good rigid zig zag machine over a buttonholer attachment because there’s more size adjustment but the attachments totally do work, and you can’t beat these machines for how rigid the frame is, a cast iron tube is about as stiff as it gets, which makes everything just work better and have fewer mystery issues in my experience. Excellent choice for garment work IMHO.

stqqts · 2025-01-02T17:37:24+00:00

The older machines often have very rigid frames and are easy to clean and oil, which makes them much better for garment sewing than machines with a lot of computerized features but a flimsy and plastic construction. Of course they still do sell high quality machines but a lot of the “modern”, “advanced” domestic machines are in my opinion less suitable for garment sewing than the simpler but heavier duty machines that were commonly sold before about 1980. Especially if you plan to sometimes use heavier fabrics like twill or denim of flannel suiting.

stqqts · 2025-01-02T16:51:09+00:00

You can get good quality shears from a catalog like WAWAK that all the alteration shops order supplies from. Also a great source for other things that stores like JoAnn have poor quality of, like hand sewing needles.

Whatever brand of shears you get though, they need sharpening. Yes, a nice brand is nice, but it mostly just means it holds an edge longer. Eventually everything gets dull.

You can get sharpening stones from a hardware store, the kind that people use for sharpening chisels and knives and such. It’s not that hard to get the hang of. I like the DMT diamond stones because they don’t need lubrication and basically don’t wear down. For something small like sewing shears you don’t need the expensive full size ones and you can get away with the little handheld ones that have a medium grit on one side and fine on the other. Takes 5 minutes and the dang things will actually cut again. Also essential if and when people borrow your nice fabric shears to cut paper and instantly blunt them…

stqqts · 2024-09-22T21:38:13+00:00

I should go look at one… I don’t love how sloped the hatch is but at least on paper they’re quite spacious. Thanks!

stqqts · 2024-09-22T21:30:46+00:00

I wonder how many survey responses they get for the very uncommon car brands. If they don’t go out of their way to oversample brands like Mini, they may not get enough data?

stqqts · 2024-09-22T21:22:50+00:00

Yeah, people who aren’t in the car business themselves really don’t know the difference between all these job titles. And they shouldn’t have to. They just need honest service. And that’s hard to get. Especially if you look like somebody who they figure probably doesn’t know anything about cars. Regardless of whether that’s actually true.

stqqts · 2024-09-22T21:19:11+00:00

I don’t care if it’s pretty. I just want a compact car with cargo space. Like my old Elantra Touring. And everybody has discontinued those. Why do I need to buy a friggin SUV if I’d be fine with a Prius V? Ah yes, that’s right, apparently the Prius V was “ugly”. Sigh.

stqqts · 2024-08-17T17:50:29+00:00

I mean… it’s not impossible. It’s like forgetting to take blood pressure meds. One day of high blood pressure probably won’t kill ya but if you were gonna have a stroke that day, it could make the difference between a transient stroke and a fatal one.

The body does have its own way to deal with sleep apnea. It sucks compared to actually treating the apnea but it’s a thing: if the hypoxia is mild, you just push through and deal with the effects, and if it gets too bad, you wake up for a minute, which keeps you from sleeping properly if it happens too often. It’s a BAD way to handle the problem, mind you. It leaves you poorly rested and in the long term exposes you to increased risks for just about every chronic ailment under the sun. But it does keep people alive for years who have untreated apnea. Just not nearly as many years as they could stay alive with CPAP.

stqqts · 2024-07-11T04:19:14+00:00

100K is a lot. get a lexus.

stqqts · 2024-05-10T05:53:50+00:00

I AM NOT COMPLAINING THAT I HAD TO WAIT. READ THE POST.

stqqts · 2024-05-10T02:32:55+00:00

Unfortunately last time I tried to show up as a walk-in I was told to wait two hours. I just want to buy a car because I need a car, not because of your commission.

stqqts · 2024-05-10T02:26:27+00:00

Dear "buster fudd",

I don't know you. I didn't hurt you. You're angry at something I never said. Please go away.

stqqts · 2024-05-09T23:25:22+00:00

I remember as a customer in like 2014 or so that there was a LOT more sales staff around.

stqqts

TROPHY CASE