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Vintage Singer Featherweight

Machines and accessories are some of the most highly sought after and collected on the planet!

Know of someone who nabbed one for <$100 at a local thrift she stopped into just because it happened to be there as she was passing. Everyting I've been to the place, nothing.

Many sewers like simple machines that can sew a perfect straight stitch hour after hour without problems. In the commercial sewing world it is rare to find multi stitch machines. Rather you have straight, zig-zag, button hole, darners, and so forth. This also probably has much to do with commercial sewing being done as piece work with one sewer working on one type of project all day long. That is if one is sewing inseams on jeans, that is what you'll be doing by the hundreds per day.

The other highly collectible vintage Singer machine is the hemstitcher. A huge cast iron commercial thing these were used from about the early 1900's through 1950's or so for doing hemstitch on linens, lady's and children's apparel and do forth. Unlike modern sewing machines these Singers actually had two pinchers which punched open a hole whilst sewing needle bound thread, thus making a true hemstitch.
 
For Me.....

"What does everyone like to sew?"

For me, it's curtains, upholstery, alterations and repairs. When I first started to sew, I did more clothing, but the relative price of clothing has fallen to the point where that's not worth the time in the way it used to be. Men's clothing construction is pretty time-consuming, with shirts being a particular sinkhole. You can make a shirt nicer than anything most people can afford to buy, but you need to have a fair amount of spare time for projects like that, and if you do a good job on the shirt, no one notices it - they only comment if you manage that "homemade" look.

But it's great to be able to make a pair of pants fit better, or to save a polo shirt whose side seam has inexplicably begun to unravel, or to hem a pair of jeans so that they look like Levi Strauss made them that length. Nice to make a tablecloth actually fit the table, nicer to make curtains with detailing you can't buy, like linings.

And for the really thrifty (like moi), hugely satisfying to darn a torn shirt so that it's good to wear for yard work, instead of throwing it out.

I'm hoping retirement will bring more time to do actual sewing.
 
Sandy - LOL

Yes. How well I remember when I first started sewing my clothes had that fireside look! My mother kept encouraging me and taught me a lot, but mostly it was practice practice practice. She was an elementary school teacher and taught me things when she had time, but eventually I enrolled in an advacned sewing course at our local tech school.
 
Featherweights

I found a mint FW at a thrift store here for $80, had it "serviced" and gave it to my mother for a birthday present. A couple of years later, I stopped in at an estate sale and found 54 sewing machines, manuals, attachments, tools, parts, etc. There were 31 Featherweights all lined up on the floor in the basement. The owner was a collector and never stopped buying them. She serviced them all herself and was well versed in many brands. Most of the FW's sold at the sale buy many others ended up being donated to a local thrift store. I bought my FW there, also minty nice for $97.50 from 1936 - one of the first IIRC.
 
Wow.  She did have quite a collection.  Would love to have seen that.  :)  While we're on the subject of thrift store finds, I think it's neat how thrift stores now list on Ebay and the like.  I recently tracked a sewing machine auction from a thrift in San Francisco.  The machine was one of those Japanese machines from the late 1950's.  It was red and white with a lot of chrome and a futuristic look.  It's badge said 'Supreme.' in chrome lettering.  It excited me as much as when I saw aqua colored appliances for the first time.  Thing is the winning bidder may have gotten a piece of junk for the $100 or so dollars he or she paid for it not including the $65 shipping charge.  The appearance of the machine looked to be in mint conditon, but there was no mention whether the machine was operable.  My very first sewing machine was a zig zag New Home mfg in Japan.  It looked to be from maybe the early to mid 70's ( No owner's manual!).  I found at our hospice thrift store.  Paid $20 for it.  All they could tell me was the needle went up and down.  Since it was for hospice I decided to take chance.  It just needed to be oiled.  I threaded it and away it went.  No tension problems.    

 

                       
 
Joel:

 

Go to the library and check out a beginners sewing book.  A good one that our library had a few years back was Reader's Digest Complete Book of Sewing.  Pick a simple project like making a pair of pajama pants with a draw string, but most of all practice.  I remember one of my first projects went straight in the trash can.  Just don't give up.  Once you have developed some skill, it will come easier to you.    
 
Joe:

Curtains are easy - almost always all straight seams.

There are books on the subject, and sneaking peeks when you're in a house with custom window treatments will teach you a lot, too - I learned to make lined cafe curtains that way.

It only gets tricky when you get up into stuff like pinch-pleated draperies, where your measuring and your math had better be right, or your result can be unusable. But even pinch pleats are more a matter of time and attention than any huge skill.

And in this age of jawdroppingly shoddy ready-mades that come in a pathetically small range of sizes, it's hugely satisfactory to have curtains that fit, and which have linings to make them all look uniform from the street. If you'll go to a ritzy part of town (just a visit - we don't want to lose you, LOL), that's one of the first things you notice about the homes of the rich - the windows are well-dressed and all of them look alike from outside.
 
My mother had a trick for pinch pleat draperies that always worked great.

At fabric stores you can find this cloth tape that has very narrow pockets every inch or two across the 3 or 4 inch wide tape. You just sew this tape across the top of each curtain panel. To hang the drapes you buy these curtain hooks that have 4 or 5 "fingers" on them. Each finger goes into one pocket on the tape. Voila! Instant pinch pleated draperies. And you can also remove the hooks and wash the drapes without having to worry about losing the pleats.

Curtains are really the easiest thing to make. You just need to make sure you use at least 1.5 or 2 times the amount of material than there is window width. All you really have to do is zigzag the edges (so the fabric doesn't unravel) and then just hem the ends with a straight stitch. It couldn't be easier!

The only thing is that curtains made yourself will likely be just as expensive or more so than store bought curtains. BUT, your's will last for many more years and will look so much better.
 
Joel,

You have received a lot of excellent advice. Another suggestion would be to go to any store that sells cloth and look for a sale table of scraps of fabric (remnants)and buy a couple yards and practice. Again, curtain and drapery contruction is usually outlined in a comprehensive sewing book. Also and certainly more convenient, you can enter subject matter in your search box and find complete instructions. Since you already have some sewing experience doing repairs, it should not be that difficult for you.

Good luck and let us hear!
 
And I have found that the ladies that work in the fabric stores usually bend over backwards to help a guy out. And they give great advice to you if you tell them what your project is. I've received some of the best customer service I have ever seen in a fabric store.
 
That's the Usual Response, But.....

....I've also had a few occasions over the years (I've been at this since 1975) where a female staffer in a fabric store thought she'd show Mr. Home Sewer a thing or two.

It usually clears up when I ask to see some fabrics whose names most people don't know any more. "Tarletan," "gazar" and "voile" are generally enough to do the trick.

The expression on the dragon lady's face after that can usually be read as: "Well, I still think havin' a man in here is freaky, but he's a freak that knows what he's talkin' about. Hmpf!"
 
Textiles...I can easily spend hours in fabric shops; I have seen many fabric names, but the gazar isn't familiar to me, but then the sewing I've done isn't high fashion, centering around maybe wedding dresses or formal gowns. You go, Sandy! :-)
 
The END of the Singer Sewing Centers

I have not posted in a very long while, but a few collectors and I were discussing this a while back about the end of the Singer Vacuums portion as we knew it in the stores around 1981 or so. This was also when many feel they started seeing the SSC's all going bye bye. I seem to remember ours where I grew up lasting until 1982-83 or so. They still had vacuums right up until the very end tho. Many different models that just wouldn't sell. The vacuums were in the same boat as the machines. You HAD to buy one from a SSC, and if you hadn't one near you you didn't get to buy one. Also, Singer vacuums were overpriced too in comparison to some models of Hoover and Eureka. JUst a few extra cents worth...
 

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