Musings...

I finally got around to sending my machine off to have a service yesterday. It has worked hard these last few months and was well entitled to some love and care. To tide me over I have borrowed Mum's machine for the interim. Mum got this sewing machine for her 21st birthday. That must make it at least 20 years old (sucking up to your Mum is always worth it people) and it still has a lovely stitch, albeit straight or zig-zag only. It so lovely and sturdy, something today's machines just aren't. Whilst mine has all the fancy stitches, I still go round to use Mum's for heavy sewing. It just has a weightiness too it that makes it speed through thick fabrics.

There is also a lovely nostalgia to using Mum's machine. Rachael at Stitch Sista was blogging the other day about learning to knit, well this is the machine on which I learned to sew. It and I have a history that my machine and I don't have yet. It is also the machine that made many of the clothes that I loved a child and the machine that still makes pajamas for my kids. I can still remember the first time I managed to thread it myself without Mum's help. What an achievement.

One of the loveliest things about crafting in general is the way that it is passed on from generation to generation - both the skills and the apparatus. It was my mother that taught me to knit and sew, just as her mother taught her. Just as my mother now has my grandmother's old treadle singer, I will probably one day have that and this old Taff and both will remind me in many ways of the women that owned them....