All posts tagged: sewing machines

Madame Ornata’s sapphire blue 1930’s dress – the bodice

I’ve  skipped ahead a bit with Madame Ornata’s 1930s dress, showing you the finished (well, mostly) product before all the construction shots, so it’s time for a re-cap. To make the slippery silk charmeuse easier to work with, and to help the bodice hang better (and hide any lumps and bumps), we flat lined the bodice pieces in an adorable cotton print from Madame O’s stash. Madame O and I worked on the dress together – one person pinning and ironing while the other person sewed.  It was a very fun and efficient way to sew. The skirt is topstitched to the bodice, but we tried to hide the stitching everywhere else on the dress, so there was a lot of very, very careful, slow stitching. For the most part, I was the sewer, and Madame O was the ironer and pinner, and (most importantly), fetcher of cups of tea. With everything assembled, we did a final fitting.  I ended up having to take in the sides of the bust a tiny bit to make …

Sewing machines I have known: Eleanor

Eleanor was my first sewing machine.  She was a New Home. I got her for my 12th birthday (or maybe it was 13th?).  She was already almost as old as me.  But no older.  Which doesn’t make sense, because I can’t find any records of New Home machines manufactured after 1955.  But I seem to remember something about Janome using the New Home name in the US, so perhaps that is it? Eleanore is named after Eleanor of Acquitaine.  They could both do just about anything, both had long, hard lives, and were both well travelled. Eleanore the sewing machine lived in Oregon for the first decade or so of her use. Then she was shipped to Hawaii for me to have, where she lived for another almost 10 years. Then she got mailed to California for me to use during university. Finally, Mr Dreamy to-be packed her in a really, really big suitcase, with lots of fabric, and she travelled to New Zealand to live out the rest of her days. Unfortunately, the cold, …