Vintage

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.