Where are the sew guys?

I saw your message, and just wanted to say that the most recent thing that I made was a uniform for my sword class

and a cooking apron from the left over material. I have all the armor too, but what I made was the hakama and keikogi. I also should look for a group like the now-defunct ABC quilts because I like making quilts. Brian Christiansen

rec.crafts.textiles.quilts is very active and welcoming.

I post there quite often. I am surprised if you have not seen my name there on occassion.

Brian Christiansen

I'm not there as much as I'd lik to be as the customer sewing and sewing machine testing is getting in the way of quilting.

You will find several very experienced male sewists over at the alt.sewing newsgroup.

DH doesn't do newsgroups, so I'll answer for him. He does some hand sewing (aprons, dickeys), and alters the legs on his pants. (They don't make jeans short enough!) He also does free motion machine embroidery of his own designs, using a zigzag, to embellish jackets and vests.

Count me in. I have sewn clothing since, forever, (60 years). My first experience with sewing was with my mother and her letting me push the treadle on the old Singer she used. Soon enough, I was making things myself on that darn machine, and became fascinated with the mechanics of it. I really got serious in the 1960's when I married a woman who sewed for various clothing boutiques in San Francisco, and I helped her get out the work she was doing. I made all of my own clothes, out of cottons, during the polyester period that followed, as I could not stand that stuff next to my body. In the last few years I have added Quilting to my list of things that consume vast amounts of my time and fabric. I also have built all of the sewing furniture in my sewing room and do all of the clothing for my wife and myself. I used to do a lot of Civil War Re-enactment and sewed for that venue all of the Southern Belle Garments for my wife and my uniforms. Great fun. I can second the shout out for RCTQ as a place that will accept men who sew, without the usual raised eyebrow. I am embarking on a new direction, with the focus on hand tailoring of mens suits and sports coats, and that will probably take up more of my time than quilting for awhile. Here is a link to my website that shows some of my things that have occupied my time in recent years. Sewing is a bottomless well from which to drink

John

John, You are a man to envy. Beautiful work, all of it! Juno

Thanks Juno. I do like to keep busy.

John

Wow! I'm very impressed, both by the sewing and the woodworking. Beautiful work!

I would love to convert my machines to treadles. Would you mind giving contact information for the Mennonite metalworkers who made your treadle mechanism? And maybe some information on everything I should know to accomplish the conversions? Would I maybe be able to use one cabinet with treadle and trade out machines on it? I'm guessing that each would need a new handwheel to accomodate the belt. Is that also available from the Mennonite metalworkers?

It would be lovely to have all the modern stitches and backstitching capabilities with all the advantages of a treadle. Besides being able to continue stitching even in a power outage, there's just something hypnotically satisfying about treadling. With access to treadle mechanisms, the possibilities are endless!

I particularly would love to convert my old White treadle that originally belonged to my great grandmother back to a treadle; my great grandfather had converted it from treadle to electric, and it's still in the original cabinet but the treadle mechanism is gone.

On Feb 5, 2:20=A0am, snipped-for-privacy@spamcop.net (Kathy Morgan) wrote:

The place I get my sewing machines from is a somewhat local (30 miles away) Old Order Mennonite dealer of Bernina Machines. They acquire the parts from a local metalworker, and I don't know who that is. They are rather close mouthed about it. The hand wheel is made to be used on the Bernina 1008 mechanical machine. I am not sure if it is able to be used on any other machine. Possibly some of the older Bernina mechanical machine. They will be able to tell you. If you have one of those then you should be good to go. It is a simple process to take out the screws and swap out the plastic outer part of the wheel, and replace it with the new brass hand wheel and reinstall the inner plastic clutch wheel that is used for disengagement and use of the bobbin rewinder. The treadle mechanism can be used for powering any machine. It is critical that your placement of the treadle mechanism does not allow the heal or forward edge of the treadle,(the part closest to you), to touch the floor or rug while treadling. Janome makes a treadle powered machine, sans Treadle, that is flat based, and made to insert into a table top expressly for the Amish/Mennonite community and that would be probably the cheapest way to acquire a new machine that was treadle ready. You would not have to buy the brass hand wheel for that model. I do not know if the treadle mechanism would work with your White treadle base, as the size might be different. I can say that the Treadle I made from the parts and the cabinet, make for a very pleasing sewing experience. I have a number of other machines, and I rarely use them now. The Treadle is my go to machine for any sewing I have to do. The one machine that can do it all, so to speak. It has caused me to slow down my output, but I enjoy the work that I do on it so much that the total experience is the most rewarding sewing I have done ever. Sort of like the Slow Food Movement. I do use my Janome 1600 mid arm quilting machine for sewing together the large bed sized quilts that I make, but that is because it has a larger harp area for the passage of fabric through the machine. The name of the place that provides these parts is: Blooming Grove Sewing Machines. The owner is Ervin Sensenig. The phone number is 419-896-2982. Tell him that John Taylor from Fredericktown said to call and he will try to help you. They are only used to dealing with the local community of their folks. They are somewhat closed in that regard. I have forged a relationship over the years and they are very trustworthy and upright in their dealings with their customers. It is not a high tech place, and they don't do internet sales, so you will have to probably send him a check but they do take credit cards. This is not an undoable project for those who have a bit of mechanical experience. I love my machine so much, that I bought another Bernina

1008 to act as a backup if my converted machine gives up the ghost, so it should take me far into my twilight years, happily pumping away, making clothes and quilts and other craft and home dec projects. I hope this helps you out and gets you going. If you need to, feel free to contact me and I will do what I can to facilitate your endeavors. John

John,

Thank you very much! Converting my machines is a really exciting idea. I won't have the money to even consider it for several months, but once I get my first paycheck in the spring I plan to follow up on this.

You can send me an e-mail when you are ready and I will see if I can help you with any problems you "might" encounter. It is pretty straightforward as to installing all the bits and pieces, but that does assume at least a little familiarity with tools and how to use them. If you don't have that ability, yourself, then maybe a significant somebody can help you out. If I remember right, and it has been a couple of years I think both the treadle mech. and the brass hand wheel were about $160-180 dollars. You should also consider getting one of the urethane hollow core drive belts, which will make that machine really take off. They are far superior to the leather belts that are found on most Singer treadles. Unless you are doing a restoration for Antique purposes, I think that the newer belts are far superior. When the time comes, I can tell you where to get the belts. One of the next projects that I envision, is converting a Bernina 950 Industrial to treadle use. Not for awhile though, I have too many other irons in the fire. Here is a link to an online org that is involved with treadles, mainly older ones, but there are a few who contribute to it who have done modern treadles.

Good Luck, John

John,

Thank you again. I'll give you a shout when I'm ready to order. You must have been reading my mind, because I was just looking again at your photos and wondering about the belts. It is clear in the pictures that they aren't the leather belts that I'm familiar with.

I don't think I'll have any real problems with installing the mechanical bits--I'm moderately handy with tools--but I also plan to involve DH in the project. I was showing him the pictures of your machines a few minutes ago, and I think I'll start working on persuading him to build me a nice cabinet. I'm currently using an old table that a previous roommate built as her first woodworking project. It's getting a bit wobbly and doesn't have a place to mount the treadle mechanism.

It should be an interesting project. The first machine I plan to try to convert is a lowly Singer that I bought new 40 years ago. It hasn't got the cachet of the high end machines, but it's a good, sturdy machine which still has a good stitch and serves me well. It's mostly metal and weighs a ton, so it's not particularly good for toting to workshops, and it doesn't do fancy embroidery, but it still makes me happy. I once bound up its innards sewing a heavy zipper into too heavy material (adding a zippered door to a tent) but luckily the repair place was able to bring it back to life.

I will measure the distance for the installation of the treadle mechanism. That is the one critical dimension to deal with. It has to have an anchor point on both the right side and on the left side. It would be terrible to make a cabinet that is too wide or too narrow. Once you have that dimension, it really doesn't matter about how you build the rest of it, watever fills your fancy. But that one is critical. I will post it to you tomorrow.

John

Okay, that's excellent. I had been thinking they only needed to be anchored on the right side, but after your post I looked again at my Singer treadle (a recent acquisition) and I see that it is also anchored on both sides.

On Feb 6, 1:16=A0pm, snipped-for-privacy@spamcop.net (Kathy Morgan) wrote:

Here are the measurements. The treadle mechanism is 21-1/2" from left to right. That means that any surface that it is hanging from, needs to be that far apart. If you use a right hand side cabinet, and legs on the left side, then you should put a horizontal anchoring strip about 2" x 3/4" that is screwed to the inside of the legs that runs from the front to the back, on the left side. That gives your own legs a little more room to sit at the treadle if you attach the 2"x3/4" strip to the inside surface of the opening. Clear? If you are doing a cabinet on the left side also. You can screw a 2" x3/4" piece in place between the end of the treadle mechanism and the wall of the cabinet. Just remember that you have to mount the right and left sides of the treadle mechanism high enough so that it doesn't allow the treadle to hit the floor when in use. I suggest using a 1" thick piece of scrap lumber to place under the bottom of the treadle support flat bar surface, and then position the two anchor points at each side at equal height so that the treadle is level. The large wheel is mounted on the right side to wall of the cabinet, about 12" from the floor, and directly on top of the treadle anchoring point. There is an adjustable rod that allows you to connect the two pieces of the treadle mechanism, and adjust for perfect motion of the treadle making the wheel spin in a circle without binding. The fore and aft placement, is about 7" in from the front of the cabinet, for each of the pieces of the treadle mechanism. I would suggest that you get the Treadle mechanism first so that you have it in hand before you build the cabinet or whatever you are going to house it in, as these mechanisms are hand made and the measurements are variable, and might not reflect the actual measurements of the pieces you receive. They are hand cast and not spit out of a vast manufacturing machine in some off shore factory to uniform specifications. It sounds more complicated to explain that it is to do. Just draw yourself up a set of sketch drawings so that you can visualize what you are going to do and see if it meets the requirements listed above. If you are going to try to install it in an old treadle machine base, then you are on your own as these descriptions are based on my doing what you see in the picture on my Picasa page.I will post some other pictures of the various shots of the treadle mechanism so that you can see what I am talking about. Give me a coulpe of minutes to load them up and then you can see what I am talking about first hand.

John

I already have the other pictures up on that site. Look them over and see if it makes sense.

John

Oh, how disappointing! I can't find them. There must be a time delay before they become publicly available, so I'll check back in an hour or so.