Elna SU - I have had 2

by Kate
(Manchester UK)

I bought my Elna SU way back in the early 70's for £125. One of the Star series.

I loved it from the moment I got it home.

I made dozens and dozens of things including stretch clothes for my baby daughter, lots of wedding dresses etc.

One day when it was about 10 years old I was putting a zip into the very thick jeans of a work colleague, and, as the needle went into the thickest part, there was a loud click and my sewing machine worked no more.

I took it back to the dealer I had bought it from - now a friend, and she sent it away for repair.

In the meantime she gave me a good deal on a NewHome (Newhome owned 51% of her shop). I had worked in her shop, covering holidays etc.

The NewHome was a batch that had had fitted a more advanced stitch technology than shown in the manual, so I had to muddle through with the manual when I found the advanced stitches.

It did wonderful button holes, I remember, and it kept all my customers happy throughout those terrible weeks without my Elna.

When the Elna came back (the repair cost me £50. a third of the initial cost) it worked ok but I felt the embroidery was not as perfect as before, but I coped.

About another ten years later I was stitching with thicker material again and another loud click - this time the machine would straight stitch but nothing else - even the reverse button would not work.

Ebay had been invented by then, and I got the same model Elna for a very reasonable price from a sewing machine business in London - the machine was a part exchange he had taken - this Elna worked beautifully but the paintwork had been badly marked with scissors.

Meanwhile the other one sat on the shelf - it meant though, that I had a spare power cable and foot piece.

I spotted a Lotus SP (same dealer) and just missed that by pennies - the dealer had recognised my user name and wrote saying he had some more Lotus machines which were not ready yet, and he would e-mail me when he was putting them up for auction.

I wrote back telling him about how my Elna SU was doing and, bless him, he said he had an another SU about ready to be put up for auction and I won that.

From the looks of it, it seems to be an earlier model, as the dial is different. But I could not find anything it could not do that my second one did.

My first Elna which looked like new - no scissor marks - I disposed of very sadly after taking pieces off it, but I still had a spare footpiece.

About a year after this the dealer who was still on Ebay wrote to say he was about to put a Lotus up for auction but it was without accessories. I won that for a reasonable amount too and kitted it out with accessories.

So I have my lovely Elna pair upstairs and the little one lives downstairs.

It is annoying that after all the work my first Elna had done for myself and for cash customers, it was a little favour for a colleague that had wrecked it first and then again all those years later.

I have to admit that the little job I was working on was on thick hard denim plus the thickness of the zip and the next time stitching a coat's hem across the folded up sideseams.

I have collected most of the discs now - a lot from Canada and US - the missing ones seem always to be with other discs and duplicating would cost such a lot.

One of my favouries is the sideways darning one - when you use it with the serpentine built-in stitch you can make flowers. You have to stop stitching when the pattern reaches the reversal point and turn the material with the needle in the work so the next petal will be exactly opposite the first and stitch another petal, stopping which you reach the middle of the flower again - needle in and turn the fabric to place the next petal etc - experiment doing this if you have this disc. It looks beautiful on dark fabric stitched with multicoloured cotton.

I once said if there was a fire I would grab my young daughter with one hand and the Elna with my other.

Now it would be my laptop with one hand and still the Elna with the other.