Hello, all. Many thanks to Miller for helping me get subscribed -- it
took a while, but I'm here now.
I've always liked sewing machines, since watching my mother with her
old black Singer (whose exact model is lost to history -- perhaps a
201 or a 15), and learning to sew on her "new" 237 (which I now own).
Twenty years ago I bought my first vintage machine, an inexpensive
29-4 leather patcher ($75!) from a local cobbler so I could do repairs
to hiking equipment and motorcycle luggage. What a beautiful beast it
is.
But I really fell into collecting last year when someone offered up a
free 201-2 on a local town mailing list. They claimed it needed motor
work, but it's been fine, and I love the way it feels and sounds.
That started the flow: a friend then gave me his grandmother's lovely
model 66 treadle, which I did a lot of work on, and my in-laws gave me
my wife's grandmother's two (!) Featherweights -- one black, one white.
Then I started buying. :-) I became enthralled with W&G chain
stitchers, and made a couple of somewhat naive purchases of those, but
I still love them. I found an 1871 Singer New Family which I'm
working on getting to sew, and somewhere in there I couldn't pass up a
near-perfect 99K hand crank, even though it meant I had to build a
display base for it, since it came as just the head.
And now I have my W&W No 8. S/N is 265363, making it 1880-ish, I
think? I was out of floor space for new treadles, but I'll squeeze it
in somewhere. As far as I can tell, it's complete, including extra
glass inserts for the presser foot, and a few as-yet uninvestigated
attachments. I've had no chance to work on it (new puppies will do
that), but I'm looking forward to learning more from this list!
I've been keeping a blog, of sorts, about my machines, here:
paul
=----------------------
paul fox, pgf@... (arlington, ma, where it's 50.9 degrees)
