Vintage Home BOM Quilt Along – Month 10

Well I promised you a big block this month and I’m delighted to present my Vintage Sewing Machine block!

This is the only block this month and though it looks quite complicated it does break down into 4 manageable sections (with a little bit of applique detail to finish).

We are already up to month 10 of the Today’s Quilter Vintage Home BOM, doesn’t time fly?!  Number 38 is another excellent issue with stunning quilts from Alice Garrett of Alice Caroline and the most beautiful rose bud design by Nicola Dodds of Cake Stand Quilts.  Plus an article about my fellow Edinburgh quilting teacher Pat Archibald!

This is the second month we’ve visited the sewing room in our vintage house (after last month’s thread spools and button jars) and a sewing machine was quite an ambitious block for me.

And even more of a challenge was finding the accompanying inspiration photos and a vintage shop that had one for sale!

Sadly I don’t actually own a vintage sewing machine, so I asked the wonderful quilting community on Instagram for photos of their vintage sewing machine.

And they came up trumps! That sweet pink Brother above belongs to Kellye Rose, and ‘The Free’ machine is owned by Cathy Calloway who told me a little about it. There was actually a company named after William Free that made machines in Rockford Illinois between 1887 and the mid 1920’s.

I love the pastel shades of these next two, the Husqvarna on the left is owned by Elina Temmes and the Singer is owned by Pamela Neal.

And lastly Katy Cameron of The Littlest Thistle has a VERY large selection of beautiful old machines (no wonder I couldn’t find any in the shops around here!). Here are two of her lovely ‘Jones’.

Unfortunately none of these ended up in the magazine this month (sorry guys!) as I needed too much space for my complicated sewing machine block! So I thought I would share them all here. Thanks so much for photographing and sending them to me.

Every month I include my Vintage Shop of the Month, and I was really struggling to find a shop that had a vintage machine for sale. I even tried to enlist the help of the magazine staff to spread the net a little wider.

I was about to give up and include an antique sewing box that Fiona, the new Today’s Quilter editor, had kindly found in a shop in Bath when one of my students came back from lunch to say she had seen a lovely machine in the Thrift shop that is just a few doors down the road from my studio! I immediately rushed out and nabbed some photos – result!  This Thrift store is a really special place with a huge range of different and ever changing items.  They also have the most amazing window displays full of origami birds, animals and leaves, all made from pages of old books!

For those of you joining in with this BOM and Quilt Along I do hope you enjoy making this block.  I think it would also make an excellent stand alone block for the centre of a quilt or maybe a pillow?!

Look out for an even bigger block next month!!