Courtney
Courtney continued to tell of his travels.
The Stella arrived while my wife, daughter, and I were in England during the first two weeks of the month. I did not do much playing with sewing machines while I was there but did visit the London Sewing Machine Museum on the first Saturday of the month. It is only open one afternoon a month! I had been there before about 6 or 7 years ago. The first time we visited we met the fellow who owned the museum, and we were about the only visitors all day long. This time there were several people waiting for it to open and the museum remained quite busy all afternoon. The museum has displays of both domestic and industrial machines. The largest machine had to be about 6 feet tall and 6 feet long and I would guess weighed nearly a ton. The domestics included the usual Singers, Jones, and Moldacots as would be expected along with a number of other brands I was not familiar with. Here in Colorado everything is pretty much a Singer or New Home, but in England there was a much broader variety of machines. The highlights of the collection are a machine given to Queen Victoria’s daughter for her wedding. It was a Wheeler and Wilson side stitcher design made under license by Frister and Rossmann. It had silver plated stitching arms and even royal crests on the spools. Perhaps the most historic of the machines was an original Thimonnier sewing machine from the 1830’s. It included the (wooden) machine as well as Timonnier’s original had written instructions. It apparently was purchased by a firm in South America but after a few years was walled up in a small room during when the building was repurposed and left there for over 150 years. When it was discovered about 15 years ago there was lots of interest in the only remaining Timonnier machine as most of the rest had been destroyed in his factory. The museum paid £55,000 for the machine (a lot of money!) There was one of the Kimbel and Morton lion machines, which looks like a lion sculpture but opens out into a sewing machine. I was also very jealous that they had a couple of Ward Arm and Platform machines as they are the machines I would most like to have.
Finally ,they had a machine that looked very familiar. Earlier this summer while visiting a quilting museum in Hamilton Missouri I came across a machine I had never seen before, a Singer model 76. The Museum also had an identical looking machine, but it wasn’t a Singer. Both machines are running stitch machines which push fabric onto a stationary needle. There were several different running stitch machines, but these particular machines were apparently patented about 1880 by J. Heberling. Singer must have bought out Heberling or something as the two machines look identical, but the Singer was much later from the 1920’s. I can’t seem to get an idea of how they worked but at least I know more about them now.
After I returned from England, I got a call from A Quilter’s Corner in Erie asking if I could do a couple more of the Featherweight Maintenance workshops. We set them up for October 15th and November 11th. I have been quite shocked with the number of women who have been interested in these workshops. About 8 years ago, I did a couple of classes here in Greeley, but these will be the third and fourth workshops in Erie. I think perhaps because Erie is closer to the Denver metropolitan area the number of Featherweight owners is much larger. I mostly just talk about how to oil and lubricate the Featherweights and how to keep them in good shape. I charge $25 which is about what it costs me for all the supplies and handouts. I don’t try and make money just have a good time.
I finally ended the month with a week at Greeley Museum’s History Fest. We have about 2000 fourth graders come through and they get to watch a blacksmith in action, wind rope, and eat beans from a real chuck wagon. I take down a car full of sewing machines and talk about the early days of sewing machines. I also have the kids sign quilt squares and I make a quilt for each History Fest. This time the quilt theme was Yellowstone National Park which was 150 years old last year. I am still trying to catch up after not having History Fest in 2020 and 2021. I am just starting on some interesting new projects, but I will talk about them next month.
Enjoy the fall!
Courtney
P.S. I got a quilt accepted for display at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum’s men’s show starting in January!
In Closing
Thank you, Loraine, Thanh and Courtney for the contributions to this months post and thank you to our readers. See you next month.