A blog about our vintage Singer sewing machines and the attachments for them including ones we have for sale, with occasional stuff about cycling, chickens, planet-saving and so on
I’m indebted to Chris for reminding me of this video, about which I’d completely forgotten. It’s getting to be a little dated now, but it’s still a goodie …
Right … last night we had the first hard frost of the winter, today is November the last, and it won’t be long now before some shops start annoying their customers by playing that awful 40-year-old Christmas record by Slade every half hour. So I’m off to the charity shop in a bit to ask the woman behind the counter who wore the Santa hat with “Bah humbug!” on it last Christmas where she got it from.
Last September, I posted a link to a YouTube video we’d come across which we thought was wonderful entertainment. And we still do. It’s called How a Sewing Machine Works, and the link to it’s in this post.
Twelve months on, Cathy’s just sent us a link to another YouTube video about how a sewing machine works. This one’s called The Secret of the Sewing Machine, or rather it would be if it wasn’t in German, which it is, but don’t let that put you off. It’s really informative even if you don’t understand a word of the narration.
Incidentally, the machine used for the close-ups has a vertical bobbin like the Singer 15 and the Featherweight do, so the large-scale demo’s done in the vertical plane too. If the bobbin in your machine’s horizontal, the only difference with yours is that there’s a 90° bend in the thread path. The principle’s exactly the same as shown in this video.
Elsie’s just reminded me that I haven’t updated those of you who might be interested in This Year’s Harvest. The short story is that some crops didn’t happen at all, and everything else is three weeks or so late. The potato crop was down by 75%, and the rhubarb was practically tasteless until we finally got ten days or so of sunshine, at which point it decided to start tasting like it should. Our pear crop was poor, and there were no damsons at all either on our own tree or the big one in town which usually provides most of our huge stash of damson jam.
Our Morello cherry decided not to bother this year, for the first time ever. Even the poor old walnut tree on the way out of town is totally walnutless. Not only that, but it’s got some disease or other. It’s not a happy tree. Our own apple crop isn’t far short of normal, but the big old tree up the lane from which we reckon to get all the apples we ever need for dried apple rings, chutney and numerous apple crumbles did nothing at all.
It’s not all bad, though. Blackcurrants and blueberries did well enough as did all the beans, and although it’s late, the sweetcorn’s not doing so bad considering it’s hardly had any sunshine on it. We’ll be alright for sauerkraut this winter once the special cabbages are finally ready, but the big success story of the year turned out to be … cucumbers. 154 of them.
There’s a lot of pickled cucumber and cucumber relish in the store cupbord now …
oldsingersewingmachineblog 