Windfall

This blog puts me in touch with so many different people and some write to me with questions about their machines, some who want to buy one of my sewing machines, but this tale is about Erin who wanted to sell some "extra" sewing machines. Extra? I'm not sure I know what that means in Sewing Machine Mavin's world. There are no extras, just multiples. But Erin had sewing machines she knew she wasn't going to keep for one reason or another and proposed a group purchase. It was too good to pass up but I tried to sweeten the deal by telling Erin if she drove all the way to my house, instead of meeting part way, I would give her a tour of my sewing machines. It was a deal so we set up a time and then the countdown began. Someone was going to come into my basement and see what a mess I work in? That wasn't going to happen so I got to work in cleaning and reorganizing my machines and bins of fabric. It didn't help that I stopped at a garage sale and picked up another bin of fabric the day before. I had that bin ... but then I had all of that fabric to find homes for. This is the season for sewing up new items for the coming craft fairs so my hope was to have some of the fabric sewn up but for now it needed a new home.

In the meantime, while packing up her car and rearranging the sewing machines, she found two more for me, no additional charge, so now I was almost tingly with anticipation: how broken were the broken cases? How rare or expensive were the missing parts? Who was getting the better deal? Let's just see what happened.

Because this was a week after the garage sale, we still had some tables set up so when Erin arrived we just put them out on sturdy tables. One Kenmore, another Brother, a few no-names, a New Home, several Singers: we stopped and counted several times to see if they were all out of her car. It reminded me of a dog giving  birth to a litter of puppies: is she done yet? Are there more in there? Finally all ten were accounted for and we went over each one and its possible problems. Here's what I got: Kenmore 158-1320, Brother 1241,  Signature URR-988C, Montgomery Wards URR-385A, New Home 108, Janome 325-BBS, Helvetica (Singer 15 clone), Singer 237, Singer Merritt 1872, and a Singer 401A. Only a few needed cases or tables and missing parts were nominal. I think I scored big, Erin is glad to claim part of her basement back so it was a win-win.

After seeing what was in the garage, Erin was delighted to see how I managed to put so many sewing machines into such a small space. We fired up the White Rotary in the Martha Washington cabinet, got the treadle going, admired the decals on my Singer 99 handcrank, and she even got to see the Necchi in its hide-away cabinet:

Necchi Mira

Necchi compact cabinet: front pulls out to reveal a chair and storage

We did go downstairs and maybe she was appalled but she was a gracious guest and admired my many machines and the fabric that was intended to sew on them. Since she is a quilter and not a garment sewer, her interest was in the straight stitch models but I'm always fascinated by the decorative stitches and the stitch quality of the different machines. She did spy the Kenmore 158-1040 in its rose embossed case so we got it out to admire. Erin is a great Kenmore fan and had never seen this cute 3/4 sized machine and was pretty entranced with it.

Kenmore 158-1040

We also got out the Elna Lotus models, another 3/4 sized machine, and marveled at the ingenuity of how it all fit together. Maybe this all comes as a balance to her long arm quilting machine, a pretty large operation, to see these 3/4 sized machines that can sew but on a much smaller scale.

Elna Lotus, a 3/4 sized sewing machine

An hour had gone by and she needed to get back on the road and I needed to get back to my job at hand so we parted with a final photograph of Erin with some of her sold sewing machines:

Erin with a final goodbye to her sewing machines (why does she look so happy?)

You just never know where these stories are going to take you, do you? I'm up for an adventure and this time Erin and her extra sewing machines provided me with a reason to clean up my act but to show off a little bit, too. Thanks, Erin, for the new batch of projects and the hope of future sewers.