I had to send my machine to the shop to be serviced recently (Baby Lock from 1996) and they said it would be 3 weeks! Meanwhile I posted in the main board here asking opinions on if I could use my Huskylock serger to do a few rows of the quilt I am working on since it's so hard not to be able to sew, for 3 weeks! Lots of replies said that I should have a backup machine and I remembered that I have 2 vintage machines in my basement that I had never given much thought to ever really using, I thought they were too old. I planned to, one day when my kids are older, restore them to the point where they could be a beautiful decoration for the house. They both had belonged to my great grandmother and the receipt to one of them is still in the cabinet! Now I am thinking that I should get one or both of these machines running. I have never fixed a sewing machine, other than to clean out lint and oil and such. I would love to learn how and do some work myself but maybe it's a lost cause and I should take them to the shop as well once I get my Baby Lock back. Any advice you wonderful people could give on this subject would be very much appreciated. I will post pictures of them. Please don't be mad at me for the condition they are in! Also, I have no idea if these are general run of the mill machines or if either is something special/rare. The black machine appears to have been a treadle that was retrofitted with a motor and a light. The black machine is in a newer, smaller cabinet and the newer machine is in the older, larger cabinet with the treadle so I am pretty sure they were swapped. My great-grandmother was a seamstress and my mom never liked sewing one bit so she gave them to me. I remember using one of them (not sure which) when I was a kid to sew on my Girl Scout badges. I don't know how I figured out how to use it on my own, my mom certainly never knew how to use a sewing machine! I was only about 8 yrs old then too. Now to see if I can attach these poor quality pictures, I apologize that they aren't better. Hopefully I put the pictures in right.
