Playing with paint: Science fiction and sewing machines: The Red Nebula.
 A customer asked for a treadle head in a red and black ombre pattern. So I started spraying with a red rattle can in one hand and black in the other in search of inspiration. The blackness put me in mind of outer space, and the title of a short story I read one time in Astounding or one of the other golden age science fiction pulps.
As I recall the covers of those often featured a space suited hero, rescuing the scantily clad heroine from the clutch of a bug eyed monster. Since my customer liked the name and the outer space vibe, I asked if she would like a tiny space ship or two, or maybe even a BEM, but, being way too young and beautiful to have ever read those magazines, she just gave an odd look and politely declined........sigh

Playing with paint........PRECY

 

Precy, who is one of my favorite co-workers, mused out loud that she wanted a PINK sewing machine. Further she wanted it to have HER name on it, so no-one else would use it. This presented some difficulties as I had neither one of those in stock. However, here at Flamingo sewing, we like to keep our customers happy,....and Canadian Tire had Candy Pop Pink paint on sale, and there was this semi ugly light brown and white old Japanese zig-zag hanging around on the sun porch, and sewing machine painting weather has commenced.

I thought that she might like some flowers too....

The Featherweight Democracy

 Here are 3 Singer 221's. The finish on them ranges from downright ugly to mint. They range in price in price from $150 to $350. What is interesting to me is that they all sew equally well. Something for every one.......

The Singer 133K13

This 133K13 stopped by for a little repair work......
 Big is the adjective that comes to mind......Someone else big and strong carried in and out for me.
This machine is a darner for leather. It has no feed dogs. For all it's size and weight, it's actually a very simple gear driven machine. Took about 20 minutes to sort it out and have it turning freely again........A testament to times when things were made to be repaired.

Parting out treadles....

 Interesting Fact:
You can, if you want, go online today, and order from China,  a Chinese copy of  of the Japanese JA2-2 (Singer clone), sewing machine, to install in your brand new cast steel treadle table, from the same shop. Depending on how much freight costs you are willing to pay, you can be up and sewing on it in anything from a week to 3 months from now..

The Chinese treadles are sold into developing nations where electricity can be scarce, just like it was in the West before the 1930's. I don't doubt that the children and grand children of new treadle machine purchasers today, will have the same sentimental attachment to those machines, the many in North America have today.

This sentimental attachment is part of the price of treadles of treadles today. It was their grandmother's or their mothers, it still sews, and it's a beautiful piece of furniture. It must be worth a lot of money..... Well no. It's beautiful, but it's a piece of furniture, unlikely to ever be used except by some sewing machine enthusiasts or people living off the grid, and Singer made millions of them right up the 1960's.

So, given that treadles are a thriving business today (at least in Asia), that I have no idea what my grandmothers in Europe sewed on, and that my mother demanded and got a Singer 222, I have no sentimental attachment to treadles what so-ever. On the other hand, I do have an appreciation of their history, their  beauty and their capabilities. On the third hand, I sell sewing machines....lol

So what do I do with treadles? I buy them cheap and part them out. I make some money, and a clunky old dust collector with peeling veneer, gets a new life. The heads with good decals, go to collectors, the ones with crappy decals go int my pile for repainting and resale as decorator pieces. The model 66's. 15s and 201s get serviced and get resold to people who will use them. Those lovely Victorian  cast iron legs, get sold to people who make tables out of them. The drawers get resold, some to people who are restoring their own treadles, or to folks who just like the idea of having lots of little drawers in their home decor.

Ironically, the value of the parts callously resold, can be as much as or greater than the original sentiment inspired asking prices that some people ask for their whole treadles......Funny how things work out.........

Elvis Presley's Mama's Sewing Machine

I buy and sell vintage sewing machines, which is a fancy way of saying that I trade in second, third and fifth hand small appliances. Now, there is only so much you really say about an old appliance such as a sewing machine: It's a Singer; It runs; It makes a nice stitch and it was made in 1940 something.

This got dull after a while, and my postings looked like all the other vintage sewing machine postings on Craigslist. So,I felt that, a little creativity was called for to make my postings stand out. A 15-91 becomes "One Tough  S.O.B. of a Sewing Machine" and an old straight stitcher, can be posted as "your Grandmother's Sewing machine". It helps sales and reduces the tedium of posting the same ad for the same machine in several different places.

But, occasionally, it's not enough to come up with eye catching headlines. Something inside me demands a more free wheeling approach, till I become like Kipling's Emmanuel Pyecroft, "manufacturin' lies to correspond". This is one of my favorite ones, which I have, so far, managed to refrain from posting........

                               ELVIS PRESLEY'S MAMA'S SEWING MACHINE

In his song 'The Elvis Presley Blues" Jimmy Buffet, a fellow Mississippian, says that Elvis was "Just a country boy, who put a shirt that his mother made and he went on the air". ( He also said, in 'Oyster and Pearls' that Elvis, "was the only man from north-east Mississippi, who could shake his hips and still be loved by red necks, cops and hippies", which is a really great lyric if you ask me.) But I digress....back to the matter at hand:

So, we know that Elvis's mother had a sewing machine, and likely she sewed him a shirt on it, because that was common thing for mothers to do, back in the early 50's. Now, that shirt, if still exists, is, no doubt, in a museum somewhere. But where is the sewing machine? Could this 1940's Canadian made model 15, have found it's way down to the Magnolia state, just in time to help launch the career of the greatest singer of all time? Could this Singer have sewn that shirt? And if it did, how did it find it's way to BC? Could this sewing machine be a Canadian, rock and roll historical treasure?

These are questions that I do not know the answers to.  But, I have a sewing machine. It runs, it makes a good stitch, and it was made in the 1940's.......and, anything is possible.......

The Singer 411G

There are sewing machines and there are sewing machines, then there is the Singer 201, which usually sells itself with in the first inch of stitching. That first inch of perfect stitching, which makes it the best sewing machine in the world.

I recently met this Singer 411g and I am going to have to qualify that opinion somewhat. I am going to have to say that the 201 is the best straight stitcher ever built. I am going to say the 411G is a
better machine, because it stitches just as well as the 201, but can zig zag and do fancy stitches too!

The 411, which was built, only in Germany, only in 1964 and 65, combines the best of Singer's technologies at the time. It uses the same type of drop in bobbin with a rotary hook that makes the 201 such a smooth sewer. It is a Slantomatic, which gives the operator a better view of the work, uses the spring loaded hand wheel and direct drive motor which gives it superior piercing power. It uses the same reliable, multi-stitch mechanism as the 401. Finally, it has all steel drive gears, which make it very robust.

I threaded this one up and started to sew. I watched that first inch of perfect stitches come out from under the presser foot and I was sold. The lady who bought it from me, was a little more skeptical, it took her about three inches of stitching to be seduced by this marvelous machine. Everyone should have one of these...