I can’t resist a vintage Singer - they are so solid and reliable, as well as pretty. This one needs a bit of cleaning, and the gold is a little worn but that just means it’s had a bit of use. It’s a knee lever machine and seems to run pretty well. I have four old Singers now, in varying states of repair. According to the serial number, this one was made in Clyde Bank in Scotland in 1938.
I’ve been sewing for a long time, and buying fabric for a long time. Luckily I have the room to store it, but I think I really need to use things up instead of just keeping them. So I went off to my sewing room and pulled down 4 plastic crates of scraps to see what was really in there. The answer is this:
Leftovers and abandoned projects from the last 20 (!!) years. I used to keep every scrap of fabric, for the simple reason that it was so expensive to buy. It still is, but I’m a bit more realistic now about what I will actually end up using and I tend to throw little scraps out these days.
I started sorting – I have heaps of blue and not much yellow/orange fabric. Plus country colours, blacks and multi colour stuff. It looks much better in separate zip lock bags. I also threw out 2 shopping bags of unusable stuff (although I did go through them a second time and pulled a few more pieces out, but after that I really did throw them out).
I went through a William Morris phase, before deciding it was all a bit too hard and putting it away for 11 years. This is actually not as ugly as I remembered it, but I’m not planning to finish it any time soon.
After sorting out all those scraps, my plan was to use them to do some string piecing. I ended up with this so far:
Not sure if I like this either, I think it’s too much colour and I’m not confident that it will improve. I was keen on the red centres but now I’m not so sure. Maybe I need to only use one or two colours in the string bit (blue/green maybe?) or have the circles in different single colours. Dunno.