August 2012 – Bonnie McClellan-Broussard

The Singer is Dead, Long live the Elna

I was in the middle of working on a new, bias-cut handkerchief dress – out of a fabulous marigold yellow, cotton-silk voile that I found for 3 euro at the thrift store – when my husband came into the room where I was pressing open seams to say the dreaded phrase:

“There was smoke coming from the motor of your sewing machine so I turned it off and unplugged it before it caught on fire.”

…sigh. With only the back pleats and the hem left to do it was a frustrating development. Besides, I loved that Singer. My husband bought it for me (at the same thrift store) for 25 Euro and it had been a real workhorse for the last 5 years, zig-zagging through jeans with holes, sewing up dolls and clothes for the girl, and straight stitching through a fair number of skirts, shirts, and my first try at pants from my own pattern.

I tried to think positive, this was an opportunity to look for a more versatile machine that would work with knit fabrics, had newer feed dogs and perhaps even a presser foot that would not always send the fabric off at a slight angle. I live in the land of Necci…there was bound to be a cheap used one out there on ebay.it, right?As they say in this country, “Eh no eh…” The only used machine in my budget (less than 100 euro including shipping costs) was an Elna Lotus SP35. She just came yesterday and here she is:

It took me some time to get both the lower and upper tension harmoniously adjusted to work with the fine voile – I’m glad to say that it came with both the original users manual and the sewing guide which both helped me fine-tune the tension and introduced me to a whole new realm of Italian sewing terms. What can I say? Sturdy, light-weight, quiet and with a sensitive pedal. I’m looking forward to experimenting with knits and in the meantime, I finally finished the dress!


I hand ‘pick-stitched’ the back pleats.

Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: El Pescador / Fingerprint:Ring

Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: Il Pescador / Fingerprint:Ring — El Pescador/Fingerprint: Ring – a multimedia collage from “Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: Embroidered Errors.”

This will make more sense if you take a look at the previous pages of the Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: Embellished Errors

The title El Pescador is from the Mexican lotteria card (that somehow emigrated from Texas to Italy tucked between the pages of a book) included in the mixed media collage on the left hand page. Behind it is another hand print in marble dust on tissue painted round with lampblack. The hand print reaches towards a neon-pink sticker with my mother’s handwriting, towards an unreachable past from a composite future represented by El Pescador – the fisherman – who must always be anchored within in order not to be lost. Ironically, although the image is taken from my Texas cultural roots, the landscape on the card looks surprisingly like that of Lago Maggiore with the Alps in the background, a landscape I’ve addressed in two poems: Monte Rosa or the Picturesque and the Sublime, and Lombard Spring / Rondeau á Lago Maggiore.

The left hand page is connected to the right by a coat of white paint that covers (on the center left) an image of a person who has just opened a box (Pandora’s?), and is holding instructions for what to do with the contents but looks doubtful – again from IKEA. Living in a different cultural context with a different language and only the cultural map from my ‘mother-culture’ to navigate by was a bewildering sensation that I explored in Testimonio.

I found myself searching for constants, strangely comforted by being near the Mediterranean sea whose waters – in some slow, circumnavigation through white clouds and shifting currents – must have once broken on the sands of the Gulf of Mexico. Fingerprint:Ring expresses that unity through another universal language: hardware (no, not the computer kind). A pencil drawing of a hose clamp, comfortingly the same in any country, neither metric nor standard, adjustable with a flat-head screwdriver, a slender coin, or the tip of a butter knife. At the top left of the page, my pale, smeary fingerprint, an intentional error, both unique and universal.

Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: Embellished Errors

I’ve been working on some pages for the “Sketchbook Project 2013” that are a visual way of digesting my experience as an emigrant from Texas to Italy. Click on the links in the captions below each image to read the essay/story that goes with it and find links connecting the images with poetry.