Quiltingboard Forums - All I wanted for Christmas...

As the subject says, "all I wanted for Christmas" was a Singer treadle sewing machine... now I have 3! And in all, I have 3 vintage electric Singers as well LOL...

I asked my husband for a treadle machine for Christmas (or there about's whenever we found one that we could afford). On boxing day we picked up my 1936 Singer Model 88 for $50. It didn't run very well but I gave it some TLC learning a lot in the process. Now I've got it running perfectly... but things sort of snowballed from there...

While hunting on Craigslist for that treadle I kept going back to a little Singer model 127 that had been labelled as a "parts" machine. It had no cabinet, no case, and had parts missing. They wanted $25 for it so I couldn't resist and we went for a drive to pick it up. We snagged it for $15! It needed a spool post, the bobbin shuttle, bobbin, treadle belt, and slide plate. I managed to find some parts inexpensively on ebay and amazon, and upon cleaning and getting the parts installed (minus the treadle belt) it ran like a dream! The coolest part of it all was that when I did the research on the serial number it turned out to be a 1924 which happens to be the birth year of my parents! I still had no bottom for it but thought I'd just hang on to it until I managed to find a nice cabinet for it.

In the meantime, we were again on Craigslist a weekend later, and sure enough we spotted a 1911 Singer with cabinet. It was reasonable so off we went again! This one came with a Singer puzzle box which was really neat to get. This one ran good from the start; it just needed some cleaning and oil. The cool thing about this one is that it turned out to be a Singer model 27, the predecessor to the 127. As like the model 88 it had it's original manual.

At this point I'm starting to run out of room in the house lol
But that didn't stop us from finding a cabinet for the 127 the next weekend, which was about 2 hours away from our place. Off we go again! Got the cabinet for $75 and the best thing of all was that I knew it would be a perfect fit as the cabinet came with it's original machine manual... a model 127! It was like it was mean to be. We popped the model 127 1924 $15 special into it's new home and it was a match made in heaven. It is now my main machine!

The adventure then turned to electrics. I inherited my mother's Singer 99k, the machine I actually learned to sew on. It needed some work so that's what I've been up to lately. I wanted to transfer hers into a cabinet because the brentwood box smells something awful and I want to use it for free motion quilting. I found a cabinet and a "parts" machine quite cheap and in our travels with that we picked up a 1948 model 15-90 in a wood Brentwood box. It wasn't running but I went to work on it and it goes good now. I've decided that I really don't have room for that one and it's really too heavy for me to lift so I've decided to sell it.

Although I still look at the machines on Craiglist/Kijiji etc I'm out of room now and happy with my 3 treadles aka "the triplets" and my mom's.