The kids need to crawl across the floor against three other teams; it is a very crazy game. Needless to say the crawling is rough on the kids' knees, so this year I decided to make knee pads for them. Well I was almost done on Friday and my sewing machine decided to retire for the day, maybe forever...
I wanted to have all the knee pads done by Saturday morning for our last practice, hmmm could I hand sew the rest, only 4 more sets to go. I sewed one strap by hand; let's just say I decided they didn't need them that bad. My husband suggested my Great Grandma's treadle machine, I'm thinking that machine has not been used in over 40 years, the needle is that old, probably very dusty, besides I have no clue how it works. I use it as a sewing stand for my sewing machine. Well my hubby hooked up the belt and he helped me wind the bobbin. On a treadle machine if you stop the foot pedal and then start up again it starts to go in the other direction, not the best way to wind a bobbin, so we hand turned the machine. After sewing one set of pads the tension was all crazy and I had no idea how to fix it. We decided to be done.... Sunday night I decided to play with it a little more, turned a dial it must be the tension nothing else turned. Now it is working like a charm. It's actually kind of fun to use, I don't know if I would use it for a serious project but it is working great for the knee pads. It got me thinking about how excited it must have been for a woman way back when to be able to purchase a treadle machine. To go from sewing everything by hand to having a machine to sew your clothes must have taken the chore of making clothes and turned it into a joy.
1 comments:
That was cool. Dad thought so too!
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