Knifty Patterns

I have a love/hate relationship with sewing. I learned as a child, on my mother’s Singer Featherweight, and quite enjoyed messing around making doll’s clothes. At school, sewing was mandatory in in 1st and 2nd form (year/grade 7 & 8) at Canterbury Girls’ High School (now CGSC). Our teacher, Mrs. DeTarsinszky (sp?), was, um, let’s just say, demanding. Because they weren’t perfectly straight, I ripped out the seams on the nightgown I made in 2nd form so many times that when I finally wore it, the material shredded away to nothing all along the seam lines. We worked on old Singers, both treadle and knee-lever types. I’m pretty sure I’m still traumatized by trying to sew smoothly on the knee-lever machines. The treadles were a little less daunting.

When my kids were little, I bought a cheapish Kenmore machine and made some curtains for the house and a few bits of costumes here and there and did some mending. That machine now resides with my daughter, and I’ve been happily not sewing for quite a few years. But recently, I’ve been thinking that I’d like to have a machine again. For one thing, I *hate* the roman blinds in the kitchen of the house we bought. I’d love to make some to replace them and use some fabric I’ve found on etsy with Australian flora.

So …. recently, I started idly looking at Craigslist from time to time. There were plenty of treadle machines in the Atlanta area, but most were a little pricier than my budget would allow. Last week, I found a listing for a Singer 66 in an art deco-ish cabinet local to us at a good price. Yesterday we went for drive and ended up buying it from a nice lady who has 21 sewing machines and is out of space. It’s currently in quarantine in the garage for a few days.

The cabinet is a little rough on the top and around the edges but is sound. Mr. Booties will be doing some work on it in the coming weeks to tidy it up a bit for me. I think it’s a knock-off of the original Singer desk model cabinet in the ad image below. The trim is a little different (and doesn’t look like it replaced any other original trim). Every other picture I can find on Google image search matches this one:

The machine is in working order (the seller gave me a demo) and looks pretty clean. It probably needs a new power supply as the cord is alarmingly frayed and I’d like to get a new foot pedal for it too. That will all have to wait until it’s out of the cabinet temporarily and we can assess just what it needs.

It came with a huge amount of accessories. I’ll post about them in part two!