Singer 404 for Canvas Bags
I have my Grandmother’s 1959 Singer 404, and I’ve made some canvas projects on it, including a small tote bag with a pocket in it. I made it the winter of 2006 when we were first in the shop and needed a bag to carry our business books to and from the shop. It’s just big enough to hold a couple of bank bags, check books, the daily cash register papers, and a spiral order notebook. We’re still using it (it’s setting right here beside me), although the handles are getting tattered from hanging it every day on a coat hook in the back of the shop.
I made a couple of very large canvas cotton harvest sacks for the local museum with it. They have a cotton program each Fall for school kids, that includes the kids picking their own cotton by hand, taking it to the scales, and then on to the miniature cotton gin. The kids get to take a small amount of ginned cotton home that they picked from the plant themselves.
The 404 handled those jobs just fine. I seldom use a zigzag except when mending jeans, and then I use a multi-zigzag machine, but nearly everything else I sew is with a straight stitch machine.
CD in Oklahoma