May Challenge Day Two: Sewing 101, This is Your Sewing Machine

Does anyone else think it's sad that I had to ask my husband what I'm good at so I could write my post for day two of the blog everyday in May challenge?
Today's topic is:
Educate us on something you know a lot about or are good at. Take any approach you'd like (serious and educational or funny and sarcastic)
Don't get me wrong.  I don't think I'm not good at anything. At all. In fact, I think I'm quite good at a lot of things. The problem is, I view myself as a bit of a jack of all trades. You know, jack of all trades, master of none?
I really enjoy trying new things and so, I have experience doing all kinds of stuff. But I'm not an expert at any of them. My husband said I could write about playing the piano - but how do you write about that?  It's really more of a learn in person type of skill. He said I was good at writing, but a lot of us bloggers are good at writing so I didn't want to do that. He said I'm good at drawing, but I'm really not all that great at it. He said I was good at sewing - but I wasn't sure how to write about that either!
But the more I thought about sewing, the more I thought it was the perfect thing to write about today. When I started sewing I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't go out and take a class or anything but I did look at a lot of tutorials online.  And you know what? I couldn't find that many tutorials that literally just introduced you to a sewing machine.
This might be in part because everyone has different kinds of sewing machines, but for today I thought it would be a good idea to educate you all on the basics of a sewing machine.
This is your sewing machine.... ...or my sewing machine but yours should look fairly similar.

There a few basic parts you should know about your sewing machine.
The power switch is usually located on the side of the machine at the bottom.  It should look like a basic power switch.

You should also have a panel on the front of your machine. You can use this switch to adjust the stitch you are using at any given time. My machine has an entire panel on the front to show me the various stitches. If yours doesn't have that, check your manual for the available stitches.

This is the area where you will do all your sewing.

There's a few things here your should be familiar with here.
Your sewing needle is directly in the middle.   It should have a small metal plate under it called a needle plate. When you are ready to sew this plate will drop down so that it is flat against your fabric.

On the base your sewing platform you'll see a small door similar to this:

This is where your bobbin is located and it should have a small release latch.
This is a bobbin.

When I first started sewing my mom kept talking about the bobbin and I had no idea what she was talking about. I thought it was what the needle on the machine was called because it bobs up and down! Basically, your bobbin and your needle work together when you are sewing.  The needle takes care of the stitch from the top and the bobbin takes care of the stitch from the bottom. Thus, making a complete stitch. Without one of these components your fabrics would just fall apart rather than being sewn together.
Your bobbin will need to be threaded.  Unfortunately they don't come that way or do it themselves. If you thought threading your needle was difficult, try threading your bobbin by hand! Luckily most machines now come with automatic threaders for this. Mine looks like this:

Your manual should give you instructions on how to thread the machine so that the bobbin threads automatically.

And that basically wraps up all the basic parts of a sewing machine! You would think sewing would be this super easy thing since we've been doing it for hundreds of years and soooo many people can do it. But when you first start out all the little tedious things like knowing all the parts can really stand in your way.
Hopefully this will be helpful to someone so they can just get to making some fun DIY stuff faster!
Tomorrow's topic is: Things that make you uncomfortable (oh geez).