Kingston DeLuxe

And to continue my appreciation for midcentury sewing machines, I found a Kingston DeLuxe on Shopgoodwill. This is a Japanese clone of the Singer Class 15 machine. They badged these machines under lots of different names, and they were made by a variety of Japanese manufacturers after WWII. I've had my eye out for a colorful clone for a while now. This one is made by Brother, probably in the late 1940s to early 1950s.


The pictures really don't do the color justice, it has a faintly pearlescent crackle finish and is such a beautiful blue.


The base of this portable machine was a casualty of shipping. Why people at Goodwill think that some crumpled up kraft paper is sufficient padding for a 40 lb. sewing machine is beyond me. Luckily the machine itself appears to be relatively unscathed. The foot pedal snapped back together easily. The leaf spring on the bobbin slide plate was broken, but that part is readily available.


Most of the machines I've had shipped have had some case damage during shipping. I actually sort of expect it and temper my bidding accordingly. Luckily, the top of the case sustained little damage and the base was salvageable.


My primary enabler (AKA husband) cut a new piece of plywood for the bottom and glued it back together.


Check out the gorgeous scrollwork on the faceplate. I'm looking forward to sewing on this once I can replace the broken check spring on the upper tension assembly (that probably was broken prior to shipping). I'll be taking apart the tension unit this week after the replacement spring arrives. I haven't taken the tension apart on a Class 15 style machine before, but I've done it on a Featherweight and the TFSR site has a pretty good manual that covers refurbishment of Singer 66/99/15/201 machines; this should be close enough to the Class 15 that those instructions will work.

eBay Strikes Again!

So what do you do with your spare time in the evenings? Cruise eBay looking for vintage sewing machines, of course! I saw this one and I just couldn't resist:



What a beautiful piece of 1960s industrial design! I have several classic black Singers, but to be honest I prefer mid-century design. I've been feeling warm and fuzzy about this machine all week, even though it needs to go to the sewing machine mechanic, since I don't feel comfortable messing with the maze of metal inside it. While I could totally take this apart, I am less confident in my ability to put it back together again correctly.



The eBay ad said the machine works, which I interpreted correctly to mean "when I plug it in and push the pedal, it hums and the needle moves up and down," not that it actually sews. (Well, it did sew 4 stitches when I threaded it, then the thread broke.) On further investigation, although the handwheel spins just fine, the zigzag mechanism is seized, the needle positioner not working correctly, and I found a thread behind the bobbin assembly that refuses to be coaxed out with tweezers and handwheel wiggling. I had read that these machines were built to very tight tolerances and tend to seize up when left unused for long periods of time, so I suspected that the machine would need work and factored that into my bid (as well as shipping). I got it for a fair price, and I'll take it in for servicing and hopefully spend many happy hours sewing on it. I oiled it and ran it without thread for a few minutes and it sounds nice. I love a nice-sounding sewing machine.

Do I have too many scraps?

I've been spending some time sorting my scraps. I had no idea I had this many, hiding in various places in my sewing room.

I've been sewing more 1/4-log cabin blocks. And then when the strips get too short, I've been cutting them into 2" and 2 1/2" squares. And when the pieces are too small for that, I've been sorting them by color and sewing "crumb" blocks. I sewed up most of the yellows and now I'm working on the oranges.

I'm going to do a quilt with the rainbow of crumb blocks, but I haven't decided on the design yet. I've been thinking of trying some applique, which I rarely do. And that means learning how to draft my own patterns in EQ7 (quilt design software). I ordered a book on working with applique in EQ7, and I'm going to try to work through some of the design lessons. I've also been thinking of designing a quilt based on vintage sewing machine decals, and that will definitely involve applique. Here are a couple of pictures of the decals on my Singer 27:

I think I will work on using my monthly Art Quilt Challenge projects to experiment with using different methods and designing blocks for that. It will give me some direction for the work (which has so far been random), and be more useful. I think I work better with a more concrete guiding principle--"make a 12" quilt each month using different techniques" was too vague for me.
On a different note, I talked my husband into wiring in an electronic foot pedal for one of the cordsets that fits both Singer 15-91s and the Featherweight. It had one of the old mechanical "button" foot controllers before, and I've never liked sewing with those. This is much more comfortable to use. Sometimes it's all about the little things...

February 2016 Art Quilt Challenge

I've been toying with several ideas for the art quilt challenge project for this month, and I went on a business trip, and then on a mini-vacation, and came back and realized it was the end of the month and I hadn't done anything. So, here is the quickie, no pattern February art quilt:

Okay, so it isn't actually a quilt, it's a quilt creature inspired by the sock monsters in John Murphy's Stupid Sock Creatures.

I used a string-pieced block with poofy polyester batting, and buttons for eyes.

I cut the limbs out of red scraps, added batting, and sewed them together. Luckily the Megasaurus came back from the shop this month (it needed some gear grease and cleaning), because it sewed through all the layers just fine when the Featherweight was being cranky and either sewing tiny stitches or skipping them. This machine is a tank.

There were a couple of extra limbs left over at the end, but that's okay.

I went to the AQS Quiltweek in Daytona Beach on my mini-vacation. Amazing quilts, I should probably go to shows like that more often in order to improve the ambition of my quilting projects. It was about the same size as the Jacksonville show, although the average difficulty level of the the quilts was higher. The day after we went to the show, we drove to the Kennedy Space Center. They've changed the exhibits around quite a bit since we were last there. The Shuttle Program ended, and they retired the Atlantis to the Space Center. I was surprised to look at the shuttle and see quilting!

Much of the sides and top of the shuttle are covered in a patchwork of quilted thermal blankets made of silica-fiber. That's right, they quilted the space shuttle!

January 2016 Art Quilt Challenge

Some folks in Sit and Stitch wanted to do an art quilt challenge in 2016, so I'm joining in. The idea was to play with new or less-familiar techniques in a small (48" perimeter) format, on a monthly basis. For January, I thought I'd experiment with water soluble wax pastels.

I ordered some PFD (prepared for dyeing) muslin and started coloring. These look and color a lot like crayons. Which is more or less what they are. Crayons for grown-ups.

After coloring, I just took a paintbrush and some water and started painting the fabric. It's best to line your table with plastic before beginning. The colors blended and soaked into the fabric, creating a nice watercolor effect.

I heat-set the fabric with an iron (the heat will help the pastel to stick, but I wouldn't wash the fabric). Then I sketched a simple landscape on paper. I used a freezer paper pattern to iron to the back of fabric for a machine applique project. I turned the edges under and starched them.

I haven't done a lot of machine applique. I was never really pleased with the results because you can see a stitching line and it's difficult to keep that stitching line right on the edge of the applique piece and not wander off. This time I decided to try using the Singer 99, and it worked great. Using a hand-cranked machine gives you great control and accuracy with machine applique. This will definitely be my go-to machine for precision sewing tasks in the future.

After the top was finished, I sewed it to the backing with right sides together and then turned it right-side-out so it didn't need binding. I machine-quilted it on the Megasaurus. The interfacing that I used added another layer to the quilt, and I definitely felt the difference in thickness during the quilting process. The machine quilting is much more dense than usual, and it was difficult to get a smooth line when working on such a small scale and with such a thick quilt.

The quilting is done and the January art quilt is finished. I experimented with tying off and burying the thread tails from the machine quilting. It took some time but looks good--no thread build-ups where you begin or end a line of quilting. From a critical perspective, if I had it to do over again I would have used a different fabric for the sky--the colors are too intense and it looks too much like the landscape below it, so it flattens the quilt--a lighter, grayer, less-intensely-colored fabric would have given the quilt more depth. Overall, not a bad art quilt experiment, though.

Happy Holidays!

I've been in town over the holidays, taking some time off. I've been feeling sort of grinchy and anti-social this year, maybe in part because it's been overcast, warm, and humid for weeks. I pulled the 15-91 out of the closet for a good oiling and some exercise over the holidays. I'm still working on string blocks. This is quilt top #4, which I finished sewing together this morning:

I had two 4-inch tall stacks of blocks, but I had blocks left over after quilts #3 and #4, so I'm sewing a 5th quilt. I'm going to use some background blocks in this one. I wonder if I have enough of the gray background fabric...

I'm so fancy

I decided to quilt feathers on this eBay quilt top. It is taking longer than expected, I have more than 5 hours of quilting in it and am maybe halfway done. I've never done feathers before, but these are turning out well. I haven't decided how to quilt the borders of this one yet. I call it the Q-bert quilt. I was experimenting with using wool batting in it. I like the soft, poofy feel of it. It seems to remain soft despite some fairly dense quilting.