Originally Posted by ThayerRags

I bumped this old thread back up because it has lots of good information in it about my subject. My wife and I took a few minutes to play with the darning foot #86294 mounted onto our 1901 Singer 27K2 Convertible Hand Crank Treadle. I’ve been wanting to try the foot on the 27 and on my handcrank 28 for a while to see if it would work. It may have been the only darning foot available back in 1901 when our 27K2 was made, if the darning foot was even available back then. To keep our use consistent with early 1900s use, it would be fun to use a foot that may have been used back in the early days of our machine. We don’t have any kind of a feed dog plate for it, and I don’t recall ever seeing a cover plate for the model 27 or 28 machines. A cover plate, with its hump up over the feed dogs, would allow the darning foot to make contact with a surface on its down-stroke earlier, which could change the action of it compared to ours.

The 86294 darning foot replaces the needle clamp for mounting. It seemed to mount just fine on the 27, and held the needle just fine. We forgot to set the feed length to zero, so we were fighting the feed dogs to move the fabric sandwich. And having to treadle the machine at the same time was interesting to say the least. As novices with the 27 treadle (I can do slightly better with my Singer 31-15 industrial treadle, and my wife has very little treadle experience of any kind), we had a giggling good time with the “rub-your-belly-and-pat-your-head” disconnection that we found ourselves having. Stitches were inconsistent, we let the machine reverse a time or two breaking our thread, and we bent a needle trying to move the sandwich while the needle was in the sandwich. I have to remind myself that there is a world of difference between the old term of “darning” and the new term of FMQ. If I’m not mistaken, darning used to mean putting a large amount of stitches in a small space to rebuild missing fabric, whereas FMQ means to space stitches out evenly without getting multiple stitches in a small space. I don’t know that this foot #86294 is the best foot to use for FMQ.

CD in Oklahoma