My Legacy as a Singer

 Blog 28
My Legacy as a Singer

I am a Singer Feather Weight Portable Sewing Machine. The best of my kind at the time. I was compact and light, weighing only 12 pounds.  I had my own suitcase, and lots of attachments.  My best attachment was the button holer.  Put that thing on me and I could turn out perfect button hole after perfect button hole. I had templates for every conceivable size of button hole.
On August 5, 1950, I was gifted to Claiborne Trott, by her husband Merritt Trott, on the occasion of Claiborne Beth’s birth.  Things were very different then.  Men were excluded from the delivery room.  Mothers were often anesthetized to make the delivery easier for the doctors, and this birth was no different. Merritt expressed his outrage at the middle of the night delivery, but was told that gestation took exactly 9 months.
It wasn’t long before Clai put me to work.  She loved to sew. It was her creative outlet.  She made everything.  Beth’s clothes, her clothes, shirts for her husband and her son. Curtains for the house. Slip covers for the furniture. Doll clothes for the school bazaar.  She made everything she could because making one’s clothes was thrifty, and economical at the time.
 I could go at a thousand miles per minute.  Clai would stomp down on the foot pedal and I took off.  Sometimes I surmised that this was a frustration or perhaps an angry outlet for Clai. She always set me up on the dining room table so that her scowl and the sound of my roar were very, very public.
When Beth was 11 or 12, Clai decided it was time Beth learned to sew.  Beth wanted so many lovely store-bought clothes that were not in the budget.  But with me on her side, she could work magic, often sewing something so cool, so fashionable, that Beth would steal labels from her Nana’s clothes that were bought at Garfinkle’s, a very expensive, very exclusive department store in Washington, DC, and sew them in her own clothes.

Beth was really gifted at making clothes.  She made her own bathing suit, prom gowns, costumes for theatrical productions. You name it. She made it.
When Beth turned 21, Clai and Merritt gifted her a brand new, top of the line, portable Singer Sewing Machine.  It was much bigger and heavier than I.  It had a case that clamped on the sides for transport, not the protection of its very own suitcase. It had special stitches for making button holes, not an attachment. It could hem things with a blind stitch. I was abandoned. Clai was now working outside the home, and I stayed locked up for many, many years.
Fast forward to 1993.  Beth was married and had 2 sons.  Halloween was coming and Beth had promised the boys she would make their costumes every year.  In 1993, she was running out of time.  Clai brought me out of the closed and took me to Beth’s house, where mother and daughter sat at opposite ends of the dining room table sewing frantically.  Clai was making a pirate’s costume, while Beth worked on a dinosaur. The buzzing of the 2 machines was music to my ears. The costumes were fabulous.
Fast forward to 2010.  Clai passed on to what ever is next for humans leaving me, her beloved Singer Feather Weight Portable Sewing Machine, behind. I went to live with Beth.  Beth wasn’t making clothes anymore.  It wasn’t economical anymore, and in fact, was a bit of a luxury.  Besides, Beth still had her 1971 machine.  But that 1971 machine hadn’t held up as well as I. Beth could not count on her machine to make the beautiful, precise stitches that were so necessary to any project. It couldn’t keep the right tension on the needle anymore. She kept getting it repaired, until that guy retired. There was nowhere for her to turn. Thankfully, she had already taken me for a much-needed tune-up and I was ready to rock and roll.
And then she was asked to perform a sacred duty. Beth was asked to make the quilt for the newest grandchild.
Finding the right fabric was challenging. Fabric stores are no longer plentiful. There were trips to the local Hobby Lobby and Walmart.  There were trips to a JoAn’s Fabrics 100 miles away.  There was a quilt store not far from where this newest grandchild lived…483 miles from Beth.  It was there that the right fabrics came together.

After Beth had decided on a pattern and cut the fabric, she brought me out of hiding. It was so lovely to be out in the fresh air and the light, being put to work, knowing I was useful and had shown up that younger machine. I still purred like a kitten. My stitches were perfect and even.

As much as I would like to claim that I did the quilting as well as the piecing, I cannot.  I am too small to handle the size of quilts and such.  And as much as Beth would like to claim that she quilted it by hand, she can’t.  Something that gets as much use as a baby quilt should be quilted by machine.  Beth has a friend who provided the machine and the instruction to properly quilt it.  


It is a beautiful quilt.  And like all quilts, it is a labor of love.