Last weekend the local sewing club I belong to provided two volunteers to demonstrate and instruct on the use of an antique, hand-operated sewing machine. (Hand-crank model Singer. And wow! what a beautiful straight stitch it makes.) We set up on a table provided by the museum for their Pioneer Crafts Day festival. We had bits of cut fabric for our guests/victims to make into various things. There were rectangles for the very young to make into bookmarks...putting just a straight line onto the fabric and getting the feel of the machine. There were fatter rectangles for making purse tissue pouches. And, using clothes-type fabric from my overflowing stash, there were stacks of rectangles and ties to make needle books out of.
The cylinder with the pink ribbon is a rolled-up needle book. (Needle books are related to the more-encompassing needle holders called hussifs.) The green piece on top of a blue piece is a needle book ready to sew. The tissue holder examples are there, along with a stack of the other fabrics.
I was able to turn a lot of assorted clothing leftovers into the covers and interiors of the needle books.
It was a lot of fun, and many people who thought that they "can't sew" made needle books, or tissue holders. When we asked them if they'd like to "take her for a ride," they were fascinated and had a great time.
This is the machine we were demonstrating:
The sample needle book is in front of the white tissue holder.
The antique machine had a bobbin, which gets refilled, like modern machines, but it's very long and the bobbin case looked like a big bullet. It went into a holder in almost the same fashion as the modern type of bobbin case does, and one brings up the bobbin thread in the same way as we do now. It was an enlightening exposure to the kind of equipment our great grandmothers had.
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