Originally Posted by
Muv
Miriam - I think the men tend to fall in love with the machines first, and then they want to sew, whereas with us gals it is generally the other way round.
I am one that was attracted to the machines before the sewing. My mother let me sew a little bit with her LBOW 301A when I was a teenager back in the late 60s, and then in the late 70s, I made a cut-out in the top of a small desk for my wife’s first sewing machine, a 3/4-sized MW Signature URR-266. Other than that, I didn’t touch a sewing machine again until 2006, even though I sewed leather by hand for years while doing leathercraft. (Still have Mom and her 301A, but the URR-266 and desk got away from us.)
In 2006, my wife asked me to look at a customer’s sewing machine at her fabric shop that was acting up and she couldn’t get it going. I did get it going, and once I began learning about the mechanics of sewing machines, I was hooked. I’ve bought, sold, traded, parted-out, and repaired machines now for almost 7 years. I catalog each machine that is mine (not customer-owned), and I acquired my 516th machine this month. It’s a 1957 Singer 401A in the snap-on portable case that I serviced up to gift to our DIL for Christmas.
In the beginning, my wife helped me test-sew machines that I worked on, and soon was teaching me more about how to sew. I more or less taught myself how to sew with my leather-sewing industrial machines, but she introduced me to mending customer jeans with a Singer 538 Stylist. It wasn’t her choice of machines, but one that we kept at her work station for occasional free-arm mending. She uses a Singer 401A for nearly everything. Since the Stylist was setting there not being used much, I began sewing with it. I used it for about 4 years, and then switched to a Singer 834 Stylist that I’ve used for 3 years now. Basically the same machine, but I don’t have to change cams from multi-zigzag to regular zigzag anymore. I just have to move the control. I’ve mended about 80 pairs of jeans this year so far, including the closing up of torn crotch seams, reattaching hip pockets, and replacing bar tacks. I replace zippers in insulated coveralls with it too. The 834 came to me with a broken hook gear that I replaced, and have been using it ever since with no problems. I’ve done a lot of embroidered patches on uniform shirts with it (over 600 this year).
Most quilters think I’m nuts, but my favorite type of sewing is mending jeans. I guess I can identify with the guy that got hung up in a barbed wire fence, or forgot that he had welding rod in his hip pocket and ripped it off. I’ve been there and done that, so I know the feeling. I remember being grateful that my wife would mend my jeans after one of those “close encounters” of the “ripping kind”.
Yea, I’m a man that sews, and I like to do it. I especially get a charge out of the young people that select funky contrasting fabrics for me to use to patch their designer jeans to fill the hole behind the strings (the strings can NOT be trimmed off!) so that they can keep stylin’ without letting (more than they’d like) to hang out....
CD in Oklahoma