Hello World!

I am still alive! I have been substitute teaching quite a lot though and haven’t done much of any sewing. Here are a few pics of my daughter’s new room that we redecorated for her after her brother left home:

The fabrics are from IKEA as well as most of the furniture. We bought the bulletin board at a garage sale and recovered it. She also has a book shelf for her books and we are thinking of decoupaging old maps all over it.

I have done some knitting, a few pair of mittens and several sets of baby booties and a pair of socks for myself. I forgot to take picutes of the knitting bags I made for my nieces before I sent them off!

I am back to cleaning out the sewing room in between working and preparing for daughter #2’s graduation in a little over a week. 

If you need any vintage Singer Sewing Machine manuals, check out my for sale page. If you don’t see what you need, ask. I have a lot more manuals than I have listed right now. I would love to find good homes for all of them!

Older than dirt Singer buttonhole attachment!

So I am still slowly but surely cleaning stuff out and came across this little gem. I have seen, and in fact own, MANY Singer buttonholers but this is the oldest by far. It says on it that it is for a Singer VS2 machine. 

Anyone ever see one like this? Any chance there are directions out there somewhere? I love gadgets .

BTW, I have found that the Quilters Flea Market Group on Yahoo is a great place to buy or sell quilting related items. I have listed some stuf there with great success and you don’t get charged the e-Bay fees.

Having said that, there are still some items I am still listing on e-Bay just because I am . Mostly vintage Singer related stuff. My goal is to reduce the clutter in my sewing room by at least half by spring. Ambitious I know.

In order to do that, I am trying to take at least one day per week to take pictures and list items either on the Quilters Flea Market site or e-Bay or both. Tonight my goal is to list 5 new auctions. I guess I better get to work!

If anyone knows anything about this attachment, I would appreciate hearing about it.

My Sanctuary

I have so enjoyed looking at the pictures people from the QA list have posted of their work areas.  I have been working at cleaning and reorgainizing some and decided to share pictures of my sanctuary. It is my happy place . I’ll start at the door and work my way around the room.

My Bernina 155 in an Arrow folding table.

The wire basket units are from my favorite store, IKEA. The set is called ANTONIUS. I still need to go through all of these baskets and weed out the fabric I don’t want to keep and refold the rest. I like using a flip and fold for that.

This is my embroidery corner. I keep my old latop connected to my Singer CE-200. The drawers hold more thread, fusibles, interfacing, templates, beads, machine accessories for the serger and embroidery machine. In the foreground is my main worktable. It is 6 feet long.

The white cabinets hold my serger and Singer IZEK machines, magazines, books, machine parts, and paperwork stuff. On top of the cabinets are my vintage toy sewing machines. Most of these I collected when we lived in France. We didn’t have any bathroom storage and very little in the way of kitchen cabinets there so we bought these tall white storage units then. When we came back to the US, I got them .

The closet has bolts of fabric, batting, quite a few vintage Singer sewing machines, more bins of fabric that wouldn’t fit in the wire baskets (oops!), and pretty much everything else that I do not know what to do with!

This is my design wall made from foam insulation and covered with the back side of a flanel table cloth. The ironing table was a gift from my dad. It was originally a lab table from an old biology classroom. I covered it with a couple layers of Warm & Natural and then a length of ironing board fabric from Jo-Anns. I LOVE it. The basket in the corner holds scissors, rotary cutters, small rulers etc.

This is my most often used machine, my 1955 Singer Model 201. It will take any thread without complaint. I can sew through a tin can as easily as fine fabrics. It is the best $25 I have ever spent! The “clotheslines” are actually curtain hanging wires from IKEA. They come with great little clip/hook dealies so you can easily clip up works in progress or small finished pieces. I LOVE this. I got the idea from another brilliant blogger, Cheryl at muppin.com. Thanks Cheryl!

My room is in our finished basement. It is usually nice and quiet. Often when I am working, one or another of my kids will show up. We’ve had a lot of serious talks in this room!

Thanks for taking a tour with me!