Well, I fired up the sewing machine again this weekend, making- you guessed it- more masks. Some stores are making wearing them mandatory, so one of my sisters asked me to make some for her and her husband, though at present he'd rather just not go into the store than wear a mask. I sympathise; I hate them myself, though I will wear one if necessary in a store. I also made a pillowcase for my nephew, whose birthday is this weekend. I can't really go shopping at present, but had this fabric squirrelled away in my stash. I've also got some movies and books I've purchased at various times to use as gifts, so I'll pick an age appropriate one to give him along with the pillowcase. The poor guy can't have a party, so I'll just have to drop the gift off, and the same for my mum's gift for Mother's Day. I can't wait for this thing to be over. Just for fun, I used a few scraps of fabric I had left over from mask making and sewed a butterfly which I attached to a hair clip for my two year old niece and put it in the bag with the masks for her parents. After all, someone should have something cute to wear while the rest of us go about looking like bandits. Just as a matter of interest, I was doing a bit of reading on the history of sewing machines. It turns out that the first one was designed by an English cabinetmaker, Thomas Saint, in 1790. It was a hand-cranked machine meant to be used on heavy materials such as leather and canvas, and he patented it under the rather unwieldy title: “An Entire New Method of Making and Completing Shoes, Boots, Spatterdashes, Clogs, and Other Articles, by Means of Tools and Machines also Invented by Me for that Purpose, and of Certain Compositions of the Nature of Japan or Varnish, which will be very advantageous in many useful Appliances.” No original model of Saint's machine survives, but in 1874, sewing machine manufacturer William Newton Wilson found Thomas Saint's drawings in a London patent office (they had been misfiled under "apparel") and used them to build a working replica of Saint's machine; it's now in the London Science Museum.
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About MeI'm a lover of good books, classic movies, and well-written shows (as well as some pretty cheesy ones, to be completely honest). Categories
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