Category: sewing machines

Missing Sewing Machine

I miss my sewing machine. I’m at work right now and the clicking of the keyboard just isn’t the same as the gentle hum of her vintage engine. LED screens and clicky plastic keys seem graceless compared to her refined metal form. She’s stitched flawlessly for 73 years, longer than I’ve been alive, yet this printer has jammed for the fourth time today. Sigh. I’ll have to wait another 6.5 hours before I can behold her presence again.

I thought about her all day. During a boring project meeting, I doodled a new block design for her in the corner of my notepad. While ruminating over my salad at lunch, I thought about a new colorway she would enjoy. At the bottom of the budget spreadsheet, I figured out how exactly how much binding we would need to finish our quilt. Everything reminds me of her!

When I was a kid, I used to bounce out of bed first thing in the morning all summer long and jump right into a sewing project. When I got home from school, I worked on sewing projects all afternoon before doing my homework. Fortunately for me, school came easy, so I spent very little time on homework. I’d happily pass hours upon hours every day on sewing projects and I had a rockin’ 80’s wardrobe to show for it.

Now that I’m a boring adult with grown-up work responsibilities, there is so little time for sewing. Quilting is my jam now. Imagine if I spent eight hours per day on this quilt how much I’d get done… how many quilts I would have! But alas, work is calling me. After all, I have to pay for all that new fabric somehow. I am comforted by the thought of my ever-patient companion waiting for me right where we left off last night, ready to start the next block. She is always there when I need her!

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.