I haven’t even had the chance to unload with respect to the Texprocess show that many of us attended last week and I’m off again. I’ll be in Miami as of tomorrow through Sunday. If you want to connect, you can get more details, or leave a comment here. Either way it’s all good.

As it is, I returned late from the trade show. I ended up staying on in Atlanta to do a job troubleshooting in a factory that came up at the last minute so I’ve only been back long enough to do laundry and take a shower. Or so it seems. I did learn a few interesting things on this most recent job that I plan to share with you -as in, you can never be too certain where your problems lie.

In this case, stitching thought the patterns were off, pattern department did their job as precisely as they could and in the end… it was a machine problem. No one expected that; the machine was brand new and it’s a good brand. The cut to the chase lesson to take from this is that your stitchers might be sewing slowly because they think the patterns are bad when it all comes down to a machine that isn’t feeding optimal to your fabric. It doesn’t mean the machine is a dud either. Machines require minute adjustments for every fabric they sew. This company has 30 years of experience in manufacturing an unrelated product so this was news to them. Maybe you too?

Mr. F-I is an optical electrical engineer and somewhat of an authority in high speed cameras . He says the only equipment he’s seen that requires more calibration and fiddling with than a high speed camera, is an industrial sewing machine. Shocking, no?

Somewhat off topic; the party that hired me said they’d been looking for a factory sewing expert for at least two years and couldn’t find one. Didn’t know how to find one (they found me in a booth I was visiting, overhearing my conversation with a vendor). I’d never thought of it before but it would be fairly difficult to find someone, especially these days. I’m available although obviously not right now.