Once upon a sewing machine.

Once upon a time I had an old Wertheim Sewing Machine.  It was a treadle and went just as fast as I wanted it to go.  Someone gave me the machine when I was about 13 or so and I used it for years.

I was forced to do dressmaking for four years in high school.  I hated it but I did learn a lot about not wasting material, drafting patterns and learning to decipher paper patterns.

Mum couldn't afford to buy me material so the school supplied it.  Of course there was the expectation that I would make something that looked good and was not wasteful.  The last thing I ever had to do was to make a suit.  I did the skirt but the jacket had me stumped.  I was supposed to do bound buttonholes but as I did a pretty bad job of ordinary buttonholes my failure was a certainty.

The teacher was not happy but I think they gave my dreadful travesty of a jacket to someone who really could sew.

When I left school I made most of my own clothes on the trusty old treadle.  The treadle, made in the days when the utilitarian was also beautiful.  My machine has mother of pearl flowers, marquetry and black iron work.  I know it has all this because it is in my lounge room.  I have kept it for all these years and it is capable of sewing.

It amazes me that when I had to do some sewing for a course that my machining skills had not only atrophied, but morbidly atrophied.

I decided to buy a machine and picked a Toyota Quilting machine.  Yeah well I thought it would be good, it had quilting on it, right?  I should have thought it out more clearly, if something is made by Toyota it would necessarily be fast!!!!  This machine should be called the Ferrari of machines.

I need slow.  I need a dear old thing that puddles and muddles along as I puddle and muddle with it. Never mind I will find something that lets me sew slowly...............very...........very..............slowly.

I want to learn how to quilt, really quilt................not dabble but really make something that someone would like to have on their bed.

I have learned how to do so many things and this is the next phase in my arrested development.  If I can sculpt, pot, silk dye, mosaic, draw and paint then surely I will get back some of the expertise that I must have had in a different life time, in a different time of life.  From 68 years on I will be a quilter by hell or high water.

P.S. I should point out that I can do all of the above but as a craft rather than as an artist.  I do not have an artistic bone in my body.