Here’s a weird one.
I have a useless piece of furniture in my house that I keep in the bedroom, filled with junk, old board games I think, each game missing pieces. So I mean JUNK.
It’s the cabinet of an old sewing machine, from around the turn of the last century.
My mom owned it and she had had it re-furbished. She got it from her older sister. I suspect it belonged to my grandmother.
Anyway, last night, lying in bed, I decided to use it in a photo for this Flo in the City blog.
Which got me to thinking about an old Singer sewing machine given to me and my husband decades ago.
I wondered if we still have it, so I asked my husband.
“Do we still have that old sewing machine K. gave us? The one you said you were going to fix up and use to sew your pants and stuff.”
“Yes,”he replied. “In the garage. Do you want me to bring it upstairs?”
And this he did, reminding me of how I had wanted to throw the thing out
last year, when we cleared out the garage.
Well, “I just want to see if it works. I assume it’s from the 1940′s,” I remarked.
Well, it wasn’t from the 40′s. This Singer model was patented in 1911. It says so right on the rectangular metal thingy under the needle. (It’s a model 99, electrified, 1924.)
The Tigholas Era!
If Marion Nicholson bought a new machine at her marriage, in 1913, it might have been one just like this one!
(I suddenly recall the person who gave it to me had a grandmother in the sewing field. A Jewish grandmother, so this was likely her machine.)
So now begins the Great Experiment.
My husband is the one who likes to sew, or wants to sew. As a youth he sewed neon patches and such onto his jeans and jean jackets to make them ‘hip’ or ‘cool’ or ‘groovy’ or whatever we said in the 60′s. I know because he still has one of them and insists on wearing it sometimes.
His own mother, Marion Nicholson’s daughter, didn’t know how to sew a stitch, or cook anything that wasn’t from a can apparently, because she was a classic fifties mom whose job it was to keep her kitchen floor very very shiny, her hair permed platinum blonde and coiffed to concrete perfection, and pop Valiums. (Joking. Sort of.)
My husband is very good with his hands. He’s right brained. He’s dyslexic, so the practical courses at school were where he excelled.
I’m decidedly left brained: I failed the practical side of sewing class, in 1969.
When my husband and I were given this vintage Singer machine, in the late 80′s, we had young kids at home, and later old folk to take care of, so my husband never got around to experimenting with this bizarro hobby. Now he has the time.
“I want to sew my hat,” he says, looking longingly at the rather attractive contraption.
And he’ll gets to tinker, too, as many men like to do, because I don’t think this ole machine is going to chooka, chook, chook away the minute it’s plugged in. (If the cord doesn’t catch on fire.) Hmm. This thing is starting to look like an electrocution machine: you put one hand on a metal wheel, the other on a metal plate and you plug in an ancient cord. (And where’s the foot pedal to regulate speed?) I think we’ll pass, and either buy 1) an antique manual machine, or a brand new space age one.
Now, here’s an other coincidence. Just today, just before I asked my husband about the machine, he was walking in ‘the village’ and met the local tailor. Yes, we have one. An Italian man of 76.
My husband brings his new Levis in to him to have the hems shortened. (We can’t even do that! But we are not as bad as our son who was going to throw out a nice pair of jeans because the button fell off.)
“Still working?” my husband asked.
“Yes,” the older man replied. He told my husband how his wife had died a few years ago, and how he stopped working for a few months and then got bored.
“You look fantastic,” my husband said.
Margaret Nicholson had a White Machine, mostly likely, which she certainly purchased in 1886 for 30 dollars. (If memory serves.)
Because it’s written in the Nicholson Account Book.
