Month: September 2025

Old Sewing Machines are Best

My everyday sewing machine is Singer 301A. It’s a vintage machine built in 1957, that is 11 years before I was even born. This is my workhorse machine that I use for everything… projects ranging from clothing repair to beautiful quilts for my family. There have obviously been a lot of advances in sewing machine technology since then. We are living in the age of the fancy embroidery machines that can do all kinds of stitches and even embroider full images. Modern machines can cut the thread for you, thread the needle, make sure the needle is in the up position when you stop and probably 100 other things that I don’t even know about because I use a sewing machine older than myself.

From time to time, I think about modernizing. I wonder what I’m missing out on, and could my sewing be faster, more efficient or fancier if I upgraded? I recall one time I was at a sewing expo and I decided to try out some new machines with a good mind to buy one. The first thing the salesperson did was hand me a small scrap of fabric. It was about a 2” square. I said, “What’s this for?” He said it was a “leader”. Again, I asked, “What is it for?”. He explained it was a small scrap of fabric used to start out a seam, it was supposed to eliminate thread nests, keep the fabric from being drawn into the needle hole, prevent the machine needle from becoming unthreaded when a new seam is started, etc. I looked at him with incredulity. “None of those things have ever happened to me.”, I explained. He scowled back at me in disbelief.

I tried the new machine anyway. I was put off by the fact that I needed this little scrap of fabric to help the machine behave itself when starting a new seam. It worked just fine, so I decide to try it without the little scrap of fabric “leader”. The fabric was immediately sucked into the needle hole; a giant snarl ensued. The machine could not move forward. It was awful. I cringed and ceded the $2000+ machine to the now annoyed salesperson.

My vintage machine never did any of these things. What good is a machine that will cut the thread for you and always leave the needle in the up position if you can’t just start out a new seam on the very edge of the fabric? I thanked him for his time and went back to browsing for fabric.

When I got home, I was more grateful than ever to have my old machine that had its own process. It simply worked in its own way. Sure, it doesn’t thread itself. It only has “forward” and “reverse”. It can’t make even a simple zigzag let alone any fancy edges. The foot pedal overheats if you use it too long. It doent cut the thread and the manual thread cutter on the back is so dull it doesn’t work anymore. Despite all of these perceived inadequacies, it makes a perfect seam: totally straight, perfectly even stitches, every single time and has been doing so for more than fifty years. For me, you can’t ask for anything more than that.

Fall Into Craft Fairs

September is here and every year at about this time I am stricken with an urge that I must fight: the urge to gear up for craft fairs. I live in New England so around here they are particularly abundant. It all started back in college. My school had this very, very long hallway through the main building, affectionally known as “The Infinite Corridor”. For some modest fee, I think it was 10 bucks, they’d let the students set up a table to sell crafts. Every year, my broke friend and I would scheme about what we could sell to make some much needed holiday cash.

The first year, our efforts were modest but rewarded. We bought mini Christmas ball ornaments from an actual Five and Dime and made them into earnings. This is something anyone can buy at Target® now, but at the time it was relatively innovative. Unfortunately for us, these were super cheap to make and sold relatively well. It was the beginning of our downfall. Due to their relative success, we decided next year we’d do something even more grand. We decided to make fancy Christmas stockings, the kind that looked like old Victorian boots and were made from cool upholstery style fabrics decorated with beaded trim and lace. As much as it was against our nature, we started early and made lots of stockings.

The week of the highly anticipated craft fair came, and our hopes were dashed. No one wanted to buy cool Christmas stockings. We surmised that maybe college students were “too grown up” care about stockings anymore. We started planning for next year. This time, we’d make cute little stuffed animal ornaments, like puppies and kitties (even pigs!) with little holiday hats. These proved to be incredibly time consuming, but as college students we figured our labor being “free” was acceptable. Again, our hopes were squashed. That year, we discovered a disturbing turn of events at the craft fair: some enterprising graduate student was simply buying trays of samosas from a local Indian restaurant right across the street, marking them up to $1 each and selling out before lunch. Outrageous! These were not even “crafts”! We were furious but determined. Before that year’s fair was even over, we hatched a new plan.

The next morning, we arrived still with our cute puppy ornaments but also armed with pans and pans of baked goods. We made my friend’s famous Apple Sauce Cake and Carrot Cake in abundance and sold them for $1 per slice. We figured we were better than the Samosa Lady (she predictably came back the next day) because we at least provided napkins which we’d of course commandeered from the cafeteria. We sold out. We ended up making 80 bucks each that year, a veritable fortune at the time.

I still have one of the stockings my friend made all those years ago: a super cute faux fur dalmatian print stocking with ruffles and fake pearls. I still put it up every year. It serves not only as a reminder to never participate in a holiday craft fair again, but also as a token of our dear friendship which is still going strong after 35 years!