Another New (Very Old) Toy

A couple of weeks ago, one of the youth leaders at our church said her father had an old sewing machine in his shed. Would I want it? Why yes, of course I would! So this beauty has found her way to me 😊

I googled her serial number, which tells me she was made in 1894, making her 124 years old. Does that thrill you as much as it does me? I think it's wonderful to own a machine that women used to make their family's clothes and quilts so long ago. I wish I could know the machine's history. How many women have owned and used it? Did young girls learn to sew their first projects on it? Did it ever sew a wedding dress? Baby clothes?

This is my second Singer treadle machine and, strangely enough, they both have the Sphinx decals. You can read about my first one here.

I've read before that people don't set out to become collectors of vintage machines, but that it happens gradually anyway. It's almost like there's a gossip network among the old, neglected machines, telling of safe havens. Can't you hear their whispers? "I heard about this lady who takes machines like us in and fixes them up so they're clean." "I hear she even says she wants to get them sewing again!"

This poor machine has had some knocks and bumps in her 124 years. The decals on the machine bed are in rough shape and the black enamel coating is chipped and missing in places. It's going to be hard to clean it without causing more damage. She doesn't seem to be missing any parts, though, except for the cabinet with the treadle foot pedal. I'll need to replace those eventually if I want to be able to sew on her.

Boy, oh boy, is she dirty! It's going to take some serious work to get her clean again. I took off the end plate and this is what it looks like inside (thankfully everything is of the inanimate variety and nothing scurried away as I removed the plate, lol).

I wish I had thought to take a picture of this piece before I started cleaning it. Do you see the gross brown at the top, just above the hole? That's what the whole thing looked like before I tried cleaning it with baking soda and water. Yuck, right?

The baking soda and water helped a lot, but then I read that chrome cleaner used on vintage motorcycles is the ideal cleaner for the chrome on these machines so I messaged my Dad, who has vintage motorcycles. He told me I need Autosol. I picked some up over the weekend and it works so well. Here's what it looks like after I used the Autosol and a toothbrush. There's still some grime in some of the corners of the design, so it needs a bit more work, but what a difference.

The serial number was so dirty it was hard to read, but the Autosol made it nice and shiny again. I definitely recommend it if you have a dirty vintage machine you want to get cleaned up.

I think this one will keep me occupied over the summer as I get her sparkling again. For now, she's hanging out on the kitchen counter so I can pick away at the cleaning, but she'll have a spot of honour in the living room once I'm done.

Do you have any vintage machines? If you do, did you intentionally start collecting them or did they find their way to you after you became known as a safe haven for old machines?

Cheating on the Program

Devotion for the Week...

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Paul and I are using a training program for the Tely10, a 10 mile (16 km) running race in July. That week I was thinking about some of the really short, easy runs the program had set for me. These last couple of weeks, I've had longer and harder runs, which has felt great.

One afternoon I was running 30 second intervals, alternating between slow and really fast, with my watch beeping at me to tell me when to change speeds. I was a little amused at myself for obeying the beeping watch and I thought about how absurd that might seem to a non-runner. That started me thinking about how no one would ever know if I was obeying the watch or not. For the record, I'm really enjoying the training and not at all tempted to not obey the watch, but if I were tempted I could ignore it. I could go out for a run, spend the allotted time out jogging slowly, so people would see that I'm running regularly, without actually working to improve my endurance and speed. No one would really know, at least for a while.

And that led me to think about salvation.

There are plenty of people who think that being "good" will get them into heaven, but the Bible tells us "everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard" (Romans 3:23). None of us can avoid sin completely, no matter how good we try to be. Sin separates us from God, making it impossible for us to spend eternity with Him in heaven, and there's nothing we can do to rescue ourselves from it.

Thankfully, God knows this and provided a way to restore our relationship with Him. Jesus died on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins. When we believe in Him as our Savior, then our relationship with God is restored and we can know that we will spend eternity with Him. "If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved" (Romans 10:9). It really is that simple.

That doesn't mean people don't try to cheat on the program, though. Some think that if they just go to church they can continue to live the way they want, without ever really believing. They keep up the appearance of being a believer, without the actual believing part.

Maybe it's because their parents raised them in the church, but they never got around to making the faith their own. Or maybe their spouse is a believer and they go to church to keep the peace or so their friends will think they believe, too. Or maybe they want to be seen to be a "good person" and part of that picture includes attending church. Whatever the reason, if they don't truly believe in their heart that Jesus died and rose again, they're cheating on the program.

They're going through the motions and making it look like they're following the program, but they're not. In the end, though, cheating on the program. Just like I won't be able to run the Tely10 if I don't do my training, so people won't have their sins forgiven and their relationship with God restored if they don't believe in Jesus.

Have you declared that Jesus is Lord and believed in your heart that God raised Him from the dead? If so, YAY, your sins are forgiven! If not, there's no better time to accept Jesus as Savior.

Churn Baby Quilt - May Island Batik Ambassador Project

Note, the fabrics, batting and some of the threads for this project were given to me by Island Batik and their industry partners as part of the Island Batik ambassador program.

The Island Batik ambassador challenge for May is Make it Modern with Hobbs Batting and the idea was to make, you guessed it, a modern quilt using Hobb's batting 😊 I chose to make the baby size of my Churn quilt.

I started by pulling out my blues. You know I love these Island Batik blues! Some of my pieces were too narrow to be used for the patchwork background, but they were perfect for the small churn dash block.

I also pulled scraps of bright orange and Rice, which is a creamy white with hints of blues/greys. Churn requires good contrast between the patchwork background and the other fabrics and these two definitely fit the bill!

I used Hobbs Heirloom cotton batting and whenever I picked up the basted quilt I was surprised by how light and fluffy it felt. I haven't quite figured out why it felt so different, since I've used Hobb's cotton batting before without noticing it being so very light. Maybe it was because this was also a small quilt, so the airiness was magnified by how small the quilt is. I'm not sure, exactly, but it was really noticeable and I still find it softer and lighter than I'm used to even after being quilted. I'm curious about how soft it will feel after it has been washed.

I used Aurifil threads (50wt) for all of the quilting. In the orange, I used 2210 to quilt simple back and forth lines, turning them into diagonal teardrops to fill the corners of the churn dash block. I'm surprised by how often this particular orange is just what I need.

The teal fabric in the very center needed something special, so I quilted it differently from the rest of the quilt, using 5005. I really like quilting these little flowers!

You'd think white thread would have been the perfect choice for the white fabric, but it was actually a little stark against the creaminess of the fabric. 2311 was just right for some quick wishbones. I don't usually quilt wishbones that are this wide and it felt very different from quilting them in a narrow sashing strip. I managed to take all the pictures for this post without getting a good closeup of one entire white section, so you'll just have to look at the wishbone quilting in other pictures, lol.

Choosing a thread for the blues in the patchwork background was the hardest part of this whole quilt. I have a few different blues, but none of them seemed to work in the variety of blues included in the fabric. Some were way too light on the dark fabrics while others were way too dark on the light fabrics. In the end, I chose 1158. It's a fairly dark grey, but somehow that seemed to be the nicest on all of the fabrics.

Before I started quilting the background, I worried I wouldn't have enough thread since the spool is getting a bit low. I needn't have worried, though...this is what is left after I finished quilting, lol. I swear some spools last extra long.

For the back, I chose this Pinecone print. I have to admit that I often have a hard time knowing what to do with larger scale prints like this one, so it was nice to be able to use it for this backing. As a bonus, it was just barely wide enough to use as the back for the 42" quilt without needing to be pieced. You can really see the loopy meander I used to quilt the background in this picture. The Aurifil 1158 was perfect for this fabric!

I pretty much never cut the binding until I'm ready to put it on, in part because a lot of the time I don't know what colour I want the binding to be. That was definitely the case with this one. I considered orange, but I worried that would take the eye away from the center. I pulled all the blues that were big enough to use for a scrappy binding since none of them were enough to bind the whole quilt. I also brought out the white, though I thought that would detract from the center, too. My friend Michelle was over sewing with me while I was trying to decide and she suggested I do a flange binding, with the white as the flange. Perfect!

Of course, I've never done a flange binding before, even though I always love it when I see it on someone else's quilt. A quick search for a tutorial brought up this one from Lorna at Sew Fresh Quilts and it was so easy to follow. This is yet another thing on the list of "I've never done it so I assume it must be hard to learn, only to discover it's not at all." You'd think I'd learn, lol.

The little bit of white is just right. Not enough to overwhelm the center, but enough to add a little zing to the edge of the quilt. Plus, it keeps the binding from blending in when it's on a square made of the same fabric. I see more flange bindings in my future.

Want to make your own Churn baby quilt? Or a throw size? Both are included in the pattern 😊 Click here to get the pattern.

After discovering that I can attach my labels on the diagonal, I'm now putting them on all my quilts that way and I am so happy with the way they look. It's so much nicer than having them flap around. The labels are from Finer Ribbon. I started out with 1,000 of them a few years ago and I still won't be needing new ones soon, lol.

As you can see, my machine binding stitches always seem to veer up onto the binding somewhere along the perimeter of the quilt, no matter how hard I work at keeping everything straight. Does that happen to you, too?

I'm squeaking in under the wire with this finish, posting only a couple of hours before the month of May is over. I'm not sure how the month has flown by so fast, but I am excited for June. June means there are only 4 more weeks of school/work and then we'll be free for summer break. I'm hoping it also means the weather will start being warmer than it has been as I'm ready to stop putting hats and mittens on the kids I babysit when we go out for our morning walks. Plus, I'm really excited about my June Island Batik project. I don't know if I'll get a chance to start this weekend, but I'm itching to get at it! We'll see if I can get it finished before the end of the month is looming again 😊