SEWING MACHINE 



5328 



SEWING MACHINE 



begun. All plaids and checks should be care- 

 fully matched. Let the ornament of the dress 

 be part of it and never appear "tacked on." 



Mending. No course in sewing could be com- 

 plete without consideration of the important 

 subject of mending. Stocking darning is skilful 

 weaving with needle and darning cotton to 

 supply the worn material. This prolongs the 

 use of the stocking indefinitely, and the skilful 

 darner is able to economize by her work more 

 than one would expect. 



The hemmed-on patch and the set-in patch 

 are used exactly as the names indicate. Darn- 

 ing of dresses and table linen is an art which 

 practice alone makes perfect. E.M.P. 



Consult Wakeman and Heller's Scientific Sew- 

 ing and Garment Cutting. 



Related Subjects. In connection with this 

 article on sewing, the reader may refer to the 

 following topics in these volumes: 

 Button Gingham 



Calico and Calico Industrial Art 



Printing Lace 



Costume Linen 



Cotton Muslin 



Dimity Satin 



Dress Silk 



Flax Wool 



Also such collateral household subjects as 

 Domestic Art Home Economics 



Embroidery Household Arts in 



Education 



SEWING MACHINE, so 'ing ma sheen', a 

 device that has lightened the household labors 

 of mothers in every civilized country and made 

 possible a stupendous development of the cloth- 

 ing industry. One usually thinks of Elias Howe 



6 



FIRST DESIGNS 



(a) The Singer; (&) Wilson's earliest pattern; 

 (c) the sewing machine of Elias Howe. 



(which see) as the inventor of the sewing ma- 

 chine, because his model, which was patented 

 in 1846, was the first practical machine suc- 

 cessfully put upon the market. At least two 

 other men, however, had previously worked 

 out the idea of a device to take the place of 



hand sewing. The first, an Englishman named 

 Thomas Saint, patented a wooden machine in 

 1790 which made a single-thread chain stitch. 

 The thread was automatically fed to the needle, 

 which had a notch instead of an eye, and an 

 awl made holes for the needle to pass through. 

 This machine, however, did not give practical 

 results. Forty years later a Frenchman, Bar- 

 thelemy Thimonier, patented a machine that 

 was actually used to make soldiers' garments. 

 The French government had eighty of his ma- 

 chines in use at one time, but a misguided mob 

 of workmen wrecked the factory and almost 

 killed the inventor, and Thimonier was never 

 again able to create public interest in his de- 

 vice. He used a hooked needle that made a 

 stitch by passing backward and forward through 

 the cloth. 



Howe's machine, upon which all double- 

 threaded models of to-day are based, had a 

 needle with an eye near the point. A shuttle, 

 below the cloth, carried a lower thread on a 

 small bobbin, and the needle was fastened to 

 an arm that vibrated on a pivot; its movement 

 forced the needle through the cloth, produc- 

 ing a lock stitch. Nearly all domestic machines 

 of to-day are of the double-thread, lock-stitch 

 type, though some housewives prefer the single- 

 thread chain-stitch machine, such as the Wllcox 

 and Gibbs. The lock stitch is much like 

 weaving in formation, and is less likely to ravel 

 than the chain stitch, which is something like 

 the stitch in knitting. Of the inventors who 

 followed Howe, A. B. Wilson and Isaac Singer 

 deserve special mention. The former intro- 

 duced the four-motion automatic feed used on 

 nearly all modern machines, and the latter the 

 treadle operated by foot, and a presser foot 

 with a yielding spring, which holds the fabric 

 down on the feed plate. 



Sewing machines are now made in hundreds- 

 of varieties for every kind of sewing imaginable. 

 Fine hand sewing and hand embroidery are be- 

 ing imitated by machines which will stitch in 

 any direction; other machines do hemstitching 

 and tucking and hemming, sometimes with 

 twelve needles in a row on one machine; other 

 machines make buttonholes, and still others 

 sew on buttons. There are special machines for 

 sewing boots and shoes, books and umbrellas 

 and brooms. There is even a very ingenious 

 machine for sewing carpets together; this trav- 

 els along the carpet it stitches because the car- 

 pet is too heavy to be easily moved. B.M .w. 



Consult Byrn's Progress of Invention in the 

 Nineteenth Century; Hasluck's Sewing Machines. 



