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
Heather who does the “Edsmum” blog has kindly pointed out that there’s a rather nice Featherweight attachment box (the little-suitcase-type one) up on Ebay now which among other things has in it a Needle-Art Embroidery Guide. Not only that, but it’s a “blackside” one! And you can read the first digit of the number on it, so I’ve corrected my original post accordingly.
So, if you’re a Pheatherweight Phan, you don’t have the case, and you don’t have a Needle-Art Embroidery Guide, good luck with listing number 160831922516. Note that it finishes on 1st July, it’s in the US, and the seller states “no international bids”.
(Come to think of it, if you are a Pheatherweight Phan, can you solve a little mystery for me? Why on earth are the black attachments always called “blackside” rather than just plain “black”?)
OK … my post about this little gizmo has got quite a few people wanting one.
A couple of readers have also realised that they actually have one (they didn’t have the instructions for it, so had no idea what it was), but unusually, nobody’s yet come up with any more information about Jeanne Sherman of PO Box 1, Tahoma CA and whether she made any other useful things.
So … if any of you good people are on any sewing forums or suchlike, could you perhaps do us a favour and post a link there to my previous post, and ask if anybody knows anything? If you manage to find out anything, do please let us all know via a comment under this post.
No, we’d never heard of it either. But then Elsie found a pristine Needle-Art Embroidery Guide tucked away with some other stuff we bought in a while ago, which made last Tuesday far more exciting than it would otherwise have been. Fortunately the instructions were still with it …
Alas, neither mercerised crotcheting soutache nor baby rick-rack are things we keep conveniently to hand around here (and now that thanks to Google we know what they are, that’s the way it’s likely to stay), so were were really scratching to find something to try out this little doohickey with. In the end, the best we could manage was the remains of a ball of secondhand black wool left over from Elsie’s last rugmaking spree.
And lo – the thing works! It really does. Stays in place on the standard presser foot no problem, and you get a lovely line of stitching straight down the middle of your braid or whatever. In the picture below, Elsie’s slid it off the presser foot while still threaded so you get a better idea of how ingenious it is ..
The only other thing I can tell you about the Needle-Art Embroidery Guide is that stamped on it is 93742 USA. And for what it’s worth, here’s a glimpse of it in action with the black wool on Elsie’s treadle 201K earlier on this cold, dull and wet English summer’s morn …
Don’t bother getting the popcorn ready for that – the run time’s only 10 seconds, mainly because the demonstrator needed to get back to her multi-tasking in the kitchen, which this morning involved bottling the second lot of elderflower champagne whilst making yet another batch of rhubarb and elderflower jam.
Now, given that we’d never heard of the Needle-Art Embroidery Guide before and Google still hasn’t, can anybody date its introduction for us? And who is or was Jeanne Sherman of PO Box 1, Tahoma CA? Did she make anything else? Enquiring minds need to know …
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