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Remembering an old guy in a St. Louis supply house who taught me about hand stitching
Back in 2005, I was picking up a roll of pad and this older installer, Frank, saw me struggling with a seam knife. He took it from me, showed me how to hold it at a 22-degree angle, and said, 'Kid, the machine can't feel the nap. Your hand can.' We spent an hour in that back room just going over the basics. Anyone still do a lot of hand work, or is it all power stretchers and seam tape now?
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miles_roberts225mo ago
Frank sounds nice but that's a lot of time for a skill with no real use. A modern power stretcher with a laser guide gets perfect tension every single time, no "feel" needed. Hand stitching a whole room would take all day, and the customer pays for the finished floor, not the old-school method. That nap comment is just romantic talk. Good tools exist so we don't have to rely on shaky human hands.
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mark_fisher485mo ago
Totally get that. Had a guy in a Chicago shop show me how to blind stitch a corner by hand. You just don't get that feel with a machine, it's a totally different connection to the work.
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elizabeth_garcia5mo ago
Was reading an article last week about how some high-end shops still train apprentices in hand stitching for repairs and tricky corners. It said the muscle memory from doing it by hand makes you better at judging tension even when you use a machine later. That totally lines up with what mark_fisher48 said about the feel and connection. Frank was right, your hand knows the nap in a way a tool just can't.
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