Sewing Machine Number 8!

Sewing machines now outnumber The Living in our house 2 to 1.

A few years ago when Mr. Smarmy and I first bought our house, my parents bought this sewing machine for me. It’s a vintage Singer Red Eye treadle (i.e. pre-electric) machine. Nicknamed Red Eye because it has really elaborate red and gold designs on it.

My dad wanted to refinish the walnut cabinet, so the cast iron treadle part and the sewing machine came home with me and waited for the rest of their parts to be finished. Yesterday was the day!

Here’s how the machine was brought to me:

Keep in mind I’ve never seen it put together… my dad bought it in pieces so HE’s never seen it put together. And there are NO INSTRUCTIONS.

Here’s the assembled cabinet with the machine tucked away underneath.

Partially unfolded… that grey/blue ugliness is a light someone attached. It’s also been converted to an electric machine, so I’m going to plug it in later and see how that goes, though I’m planning on getting a belt for the treadle and reconverting it back to it’s original unelectrifiedness. Fun for power outages! From the instructions I read online, it sounded like converting back and forth is fairly quick.

 

You can see in that last one that the finish is a little dull on the machine. I’m going to look into make it bright and shiny again. Or does it look cooler this way since you can tell it’s old?

It took me about 3 hours to put it together. And I won’t lie, I enjoyed it. I like assembling stuff. This cabinet is so well made, I didn’t really feel like I was at much of a disadvantage not having instructions… all the pieces fit together really nicely and just make sense. Anyway, if you ever buy a bunch of furniture from Ikea, I would be happy to put it together for you. 😀

I’ll probably do some more internetting to find out about dates and such, but now that it’s all put together, I think it’s a pretty standard Singer 66. At least the picture I found of the manual looks exactly like mine when it’s all folded up!