A visitor...

 ...actually three, my friends Graham, Rich, and Patty.  And this delightful beastie of a Stitchwell with its goldfish-lined box

 1920s wallpaper

 Hand-painted decals

 Hearts..

and flowers..

All in a weeks' work

Shelves of sewing machine parts.. This week is Feet and Plates..

Sorting Stuff

 Today's post brought these.  Bought on Fleabay in the last couple of days, and in need of cataloguing, counting, packing, and uploading to my Sewing Machines Website
This is a surprisingly big part of my life, and is my third 10,000 hours skill (google that up, please, that's a skill too) of a pretty busy lifetime so far.
A typical sort is like the one above - parts from one or two machines, many of which will be repeats (and therefore will have stock numbers to assign) and some of which will be unique, or the sort of item that needs a separate image as condition varies so much on some things..

Here's a basketful I sorted and photographed this Summer.  Odd feets (nothing unique in here, I hope..)

 Sorted into types, and some needing testing put aside.  I test everything I can on a 1928 Singer treadle.. (That's for Low Shank feet).  I also have a High Shank Singer (31k15) treadle industrial, and when I have  Slant Shank machines here I test everything madly on those too..
I lay them out in sorts, count and catalogue and put away in  tins..

 And every unique item needs a packet, a number, a price, and a photograph, notes made of part numbers and sizes, putting on the database,and uploading to the website

Not a job for the unfernickety..

I'm always happy to ID odd feet and attachments, please email me with an image

Oh, and here are the other things you almost always find in sewing machine drawers.. Yes, that's a razor blade.  Watch your fingers..
I commonly find three different (and incompatible) sorts of bobbins in the drawer too..

Usually the suspender buttons are singles..

Saturday Morning In Kent

I came out of my bedroom to find this.. Now, how did I miss that last night..

Saturday, sewing machines

This old beauty was sold today, a Gaffer badged Jones CS that I was quite fond of...

Tuesday, Backache

Perhaps, too many sewing machines..

Ada Lovelace Day

and I have pledged to blog about women and technology... So I am going to talk about sewing machines. Because that's what I know, and because I have a sneaking suspicion that, had I been born with different plumbing, I would have been an engineer by trade, not a sewist.

Picture here was taken in 2003, at a meeting of Old-Sewing-Machine Fanatics at my workshop. I have just worked out how to thread and adjust an 1880s machine of great beauty and charm, still working and doing it's bit after 12o-odd years.

When the sewing machine came into general use, in the 1860s and 1870s, it changed the world. Before this the average household would have had very few new clothes; what was made was made by hand and passed down and repaired until nothing was left. After the advent of the domestic sewing machine, came Fashion, Consumerism, and relative plenty. Household linenes could be made at speed. Clothes did not have to have several owners.

As the machines were too expensive for most people to afford to buy one outright, there was a system of "hire purchase" - not new but uncommon till that time. From this we directly get the Car Culture, because that too needs a time-delayed system of payments for ordinary people to be able to play. And sewing machines were pretty much mass-produced, on assembly lines, in factories, with a workforce dedicated to just that one job. Compare this with bicycles - also offered as a great liberator of women and the working classes, but mostly made in small workshops not much different from the village blacksmith's smoky hovel.

Then there is fabric. If you have a small market, hand-woven and hand-dyed will suffice. If the demand increases 100 or 1000-fold, than you must make factories to make fabrics, printing must improve, dyes will poison the river, and another workforce arrives. My grandmother was a mill hand in Lancashire, England at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. She was well-paid, independent, and was regarded as having "let herself down" by marrying and giving it up. She ran huge, dangerous, dirty machines on a shift system, and, at 13, was a supervisor (doffer) over a whole floor of other (mostly female) workers.
Thread must be much better quality, so spinning mills must be made which can produce this. Needles and thread can be quite crude for hand sewing, but machines require precision...
And the Computer was, of course, preceded by the Loom... The first Punch Card systems were for weaving cloth, not crunching numbers..

My conclusion? Without the Sewing Machine Revolution, we would have so much less of out modern world. Maybe good, maybe bad, some of each perhaps, but different..

And me? I love machines. I like screwdrivers, oil, precision; things which work as they should. I like my car, love my bicycle, would not live without my sewing machines...