Sewing Time

It’s amazing what you can do with a bunch of old sheets

I’ve had a post in my head for the last few months. It’s about my recent turn into sewing, as hinted in my previous measurement-related writing.

In this post I was going to talk about saving up for a sewing machine, and then receiving a 50-year old Globe Cub 31 that belonged to my late grandmother and which had been sitting in an aunt’s sewing cupboard for years. This happens to be the same model as my mother’s, the machine I learned on,2 and so I would have gushed about how this was exactly what I wanted and is vastly more satisfying to use (at least to me) than a modern computerised system. At this point we were at serious risk of a digression on prices and inflation in the 1970s and the following decades, because it wasn’t until I started plugging newspaper ads for the Cub 3 into the calculator on the Reserve Bank website that I realised quite how wild that must have been.

The Globe Cub 3, in front of its plastic carrying case. Just look at it.

Back on topic—but still on the subject of prices—I’d have next bemoaned how the money I had saved for the big-ticket item I no-longer needed to purchase had instead immediately disappeared into a black hole of fabric and miscellaneous equipment. This despite most of the fabric that I’ve actually used being old sheets that had been sitting in the flat kitchen, allegedly for cleaning. Then it would have been time to wax poetical about the meditative power of hemming rags.3

Maybe about here would be a good place to talk about why this attracts me, and the outlet for creativity it provides—and why the computer-based stuff I usually do just wasn’t cutting it. This would then have been a good opportunity to segue into the things I’ve actually made, from coasters and washing bags to stuffed animals, and the trials and tribulations thereof. And then maybe (at least, now that this post has been more than a month in my brain, and I’ve continued experimenting4) I’d talk about the projects I’ve risked with the fabric I’ve bought, and plan in the future.

The “Zorse” (at least, that’s what the pattern calls it), my first stuffed animal, lying limply on the table.
The hat that actually fit.
These oven mitts shrank in the wash, but they’re still useable. Something to come back to though.
A better-executed stuffed animal, a plesiosaur.

But this brings me to why I never did manage to write the thing: I’ve been having too much fun. It’s not like I’ve only been sewing, but I’ve certainly been Computer Touching a lot less—and been happier for it.5 This has included writing, which I should really get back to. The hope is that now that I’ve written the above in whatever tense this is called I can do that, which would be useful right now because this summer is just so damn hot already.6 Like, ironing was already not my favourite part, and right now it is to be avoided. Maybe I should be doing more with knits…

Will this be a sewing blog from now on? Probably not exclusively, but also probably at least a little bit. There’s a certain kind of tradwife buy-my-custom-fabric-prints vibe I very much do not want to go for, but there are still things I suspect I will want to report back on. Next project is a fitted shirt from a pattern I printed off of freesewing.eu—this will either be a great success or a complete disaster. Let’s find out!

Partially sewn piecework trans flag, just because.

  1. The Cub 3 was sold under the Globe brand in NZ, but more or less the same machine seems to have been a Waltsons Celestial Cub 3 in Australia, a Frister & Rossmann Cub 3 in the UK, a Privileg Compact 930 in (presumably West) Germany, and a Kenmore 158.1050 in the US. I’m not sure what the exact arrangement was here, but I think Globe at least was already a zombie brand by the 1970s.↩︎

  2. Save that mum’s has a thread cutter on the shank, but I can live with using a separate tool.↩︎

  3. I’m slowly weaning us off using paper towels for everything.↩︎

  4. In fact, while drafting this post I took a couple of days to make a pair of oven mitts, and then a (too-small) hat. And in the month or so this sat in my drafts since then I’ve made a couple of skirts, a better hat, a bag, two stuffed plesiosaurs…↩︎

  5. Though I suspect I’ll change my tune a little bit when it turns out I’ve left a bunch of stuff unpatched.↩︎

  6. I wrote this in early December, and the monkey’s paw has curled—we’ve had a completely erratic summer. One of the skirts I made was lined, which has been very helpful on the colder and wetter days in particular.↩︎

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File under: Sewing Hobbies Fabric Crafts Clothing Sewing Machine Globe Cub 3

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