First sewing experience

What a charmingly lunatic project! :) I make things just for the hell of it at times - reinventing the corset and the like... Keep us posted on how it goes.

And on the suit! :)

Take a look at some of the toy machines that come up on ebay, and do a google for touy sewing machines. There are quite a lot out there. Some of the older ones were built just like the real thing, and sewed a neat stitch. The modern plastic things are no good at all.

Hm... Suddenly I see a vision of Fred Dibna running a sewing machine off his traction engine up there in heaven!

Hello, Kate.

As a member of the male "persuasion", I must confess that I take corsets _very_ seriously!

:-)

But please don't overdo it, Ladies. I know that corsets have been known to cause health problems.

Mike

You can see the Elizabethan one I did on my web site. There will be another soon...

The fairy wings on my site were part engineering, part sewing.

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Hello again, AJ.

My mother has given me permission to use her machine, though I'm concerned about the stress which heavy denim would place upon a machine which is designed for home use. I had to go to an interior decorating shop to get my material.

By the way, did you know that the first practical sewing machine was made by a Freench tailor named Barthelemy Thimonnier? Thimonnier built eighty of these mostly-wooden machines to equip his garment factory during the time of the French Revolution. Unfortunately, his fellow tailors were concerned about loosing work, so they burned his factory to the ground, and he had to relocate to another part of France. After the second burning, he relocated to England.

Mike Mandaville

In article , Mike Mandaville of

Yup, I know about him. And about many others too ;) Unfortunately, my oldest machine is 1874-ish. Have you had a read of things like the ISMACS website yet?

Hello again, AJ.

I have already been to the ISMACS site, because that's where I read the biography of James Gibbs, though I'm glad that you directed me back there, because there is a lot more to that site than I realized. As you probably know, Gibbs designed the first single-thread machine, which is the type of machine which I have. In fact, the ISMACS biography of Gibbs is the only one which I have been able to find. Of course Gibbs, like Thimonnier, carved his original prototype out of wood, and the type of machine which I have in mind to build for myself will be essentially like the Gibbs prototype. In other words, it will be made out of wood, and it will be based upon the single-thread principle.

Mike

In article , Mike Mandaville of

Aha - now, if it is indeed a W&G that you have, then it isn't a toy. Believe it or not, that is a full-size machine designed for grown-ups! Your project is beginning to interest me deeply. Whereabouts are you, geographically-speaking?

Another site you may enjoy is

However, the 'mother lode' is the Smithsonian site at

Take lunch and a ball of string to leave yourself a trail to find your way back out. ;-)

Mike,

Good luck with your project to build a sewing machine - sounds interesting for the mechanically inclined (not me!).

One thing that worries me slightly is your mention of buying denim from an interior decorating shop to make a suit from. I wonder if you have bought an upholstory denim or is it something lighter? If it is upholstory weight denim - I really wouldn't fancy a suit from it - its going to be heavy, stiff and rub in interesting ways!

For clothing construction I'd be tempted to stay away from a single thread machine that produces a chain sticth - so easy to unravel!

Regards,

Sarah

Hello again, AJ.

I have a single-thread machine, but it's a toy. By the way, yesterday I took the handwheel off of my machine, and connected it to my drill. And now today I'm going to mount the new contraption onto a wooden base. I live near Austin, Texas.

Mike Mandaville

the 'mother lode' is the Smithsonian site

I really appreciate you posting this link. Yesterday I read the first chapter of _The Sewing Machine: Its Invention and Development_, and today I will be continuing where I left off yesterday.

Mike

The denim I have is the same weight as that which Levis are made out of. When I first went looking for it, I tried Hancock, and they didn't have it. Then I tried the Hobby Lobby, and they didn't have it. Then I called up JoAnn's, and was told that the weight was not printed on the bolt. The Interior Decorating shop was the only place where I could find Levis-thickness indigo blue denim.

The only reason why I will be starting out with a chain-stitching machine is simply because I think that a single-thread chain-stitching machine would probably have the simplest stitching mechanism possible. I do plan on upgrading it to a lockswitching machine eventually, though.

I might even write a book about it! :-)

Mike

It's a pleasure to share treasure. Smithsonian has a fantastic archive of printed material which is available to download, print, read. They also have a fine collection of machines, including patent models, but they are not generally on display. Groups can make advance arrangements to view them sometimes.

I get raw HTML too. I would've guessed it's because the page was created with Microsoft software, which I don't use--but I see you're using MS too. Odd.

Yes, but I do use Firefox instead of IE. I asked about it in a support group and here is what they told me when I asked if it was some setting that I had wrong.

" Nope, it's MIT. Doing View->Page Info shows that they claim it to be text/plain, instead of text/html. I emailed the author of the page. It works in IE which says that the server's mime.types file isn't correctly configured to handle the extension .htm-1" Another post said the page appears to be abandoned, so it probably won't be fixed soon.

I found a better animation. Here is the link. Maybe you gals will have better luck with this one -