Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Squeezing in work during summer vacation

All my sewing time has been dedicated to work stuff lately and I'm feeling soo deprived. I've been squeezing in an hour or two at night, after the kids are in bed, but my poor old eyes don't last very long at that hour. The assignment for the week is 3 sets of tab top curtains lined with blackout. I'm almost done with the first set. Here's my workspace today...

My own bathroom still has NO curtains, so that will be the first thing I work on when I have more sewing time. Luckily, there are no neighbors in the back. Next job will have to be for me... A NICE shower curtain and some for the window too.

Maybe when the kids go back to school there will be more time so I'll be able to work and sew a few things for home as well.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Restoring granny's old Singer

Many years ago, I saved my granny's old Singer from certain death. She had two machines sitting in her house and I wish I had saved them both, but there was no room to keep them. So I brought home the one that was in better condition. It's been sitting for a long time, covered up with a plastic tarp in my mother's patio and I'm finally going to get to work on it. After a little bit of research, I think it's a Singer 15-30 treadle machine. It has a motor that looks like it was attached, but the cabinet still has the treadle base. Here's a picture of the motor we removed.

My son has taken it apart and cleaned most of the rusted parts, but left home to test the waters of independence when he finished school. I miss him. But anyway, the machine is in parts, not on it's treadle anymore, and NOW I want to restore it so it can be used. Here's what it looks like right now.

I know... the gold decal coloring is sadly no longer gold. But the machine was in really sad shape when we got it. It looks a whole lot better, though I will definitely do more cleaning.

These parts here were NOT silver.. they were covered with a light coating of rust. You couldn't see the designs. It took a lot of work, and there are spots in the plates where the rust has corroded the metal, but the designs are still visible. I wish we had a before picture of how badly damaged these were. Just imagine them brown with barely any designs... that was before.

I took pictures of the treadle part, but they didn't seem to look right... I'll try again later. Something was a bit odd about them. However, I'm pretty sure the treadle is in decent shape and can be restored. The cabinet top might need replacement. I'll post a pic when I get a good one.

My goal is to restore it as a working machine, not a display item. It was my granny's workhorse and she did a lot of sewing so I believe it wants to be useful again. It'll take me a long time to figure out how to get it cleaned up, hooked up, and working again since this is the first time I've done anything like this. But I'm excited and hoping it'll be working again soon.