Tamara wrote:
the early instruction booklets that came with machines.
What's "early"? And, does anyone know how well those early
"combination" machines sold? As opposed to the two -- independent
(sewing and embroidery) -- ones?
I think the book referred to was put out by the Singer sewing company.
And, yes, it does refer to the use of a simple Singer straight-stitch
sewing machine to do embroidery, not a specialized embroidery machine.
Our local library has a copy of the book - I think it's called "Singer
Instructions For Art Embroidery and Lace Work" - and it has been
reprinted (Dover?). I don't know how early the original book came out,
but the one I've seen was from the 1920's.
So, how was the embroidery done? As I recall, you position your needle,
put down the presser foot, and put the needle down through the fabric.
Then you either
(1) leave the needle in the fabric, lift the presser foot, turn the
work around the other way, adjust the stitch length if you don't want a
straight line of satin stitches but want them to widen or narrow, and
take the next stitch back, or
(2) raise the presser foot, move the fabric to where you want the next
stitch to go in, put the presser foot down again, and put the needle
down into the fabric and bring it back up.
When you've repeated that several thousand times, maintaining even
tension all the way, you've got yourself a nice piece of embroidery.
The picture on the cover showed complicated curving whitework
embroidery done in lovely even satin stitch. I can't imagine anyone not
employed by Singer ever successfully accomplishing that level of work -
or spending the time to do it - but I think a lot of women bought the
book thinking it was all going to be very easy. (The "Lace Work" part
of the title referred to the fact that after you'd done all your satin
stitch you could cut out part of the background fabric to make cutwork
'lace'.)
It reminds me of a fad that flowered for six months or so about 25
years ago - some sewing machine company hired people to tour around
textile shows demonstrating how you could do cross stitch with the
zig-zag feature on their sewing machine. You bought very small diameter
double-pointed knitting needles. You laid them down on the fabric and
zig-zagged over them with your machine, one stitch for each stitch on
your pattern, then you turned the whole thing around and zig-zagged
back again to create the other side of the cross stitch. Then you
changed your thread to the next colour and did the whole thing again in
the next colour area, and so on.
The whole point was that you could do even cross stitch on
non-evenweave fabrics. As far as I can tell, the demonstrators were the
only people who were ever able to do the technique without breaking
their sewing machine needle on the steel double-pointed needles. I knew
people who bought the dpns but nobody who tried it more than once. It
was tedious and frustrating.
Adele
North Vancouver, BC
(west coast of Canada)
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