Old sewing machines! I got into sewing because I think old sewing machines are beautiful works of mechanical art. And eventually I wanted to be able to use them to actually make things.

This is Miss Hannah, the machine that got me into this. It was a decoration in the living room for years until I oiled it, belted it, and found out that it had been in perfect working order the whole time. It's named after my great-grandmother, the presumed original owner. (It was made the year she got married, so we figured it was a wedding present.)
In this picture, Miss Hannah is repairing the pocket on my warmest coat.


This beat-up machine is Eulalie. When I moved, I couldn't take the machine with me because my small car doesn't hold large tables with sewing machines in them. So my first treadle remained at my parents'. Eulalie here was a gift from my SO, who sent the money and said to go get it.


This one is Geraldine. I took this one from my grandmother's house when we cleared it out after she died. It's been annoyingly finicky and keeps not quite working right. It drives me nuts. People online keep gushing about how this was one of the best Singers ever made, and I keep looking at mine like "... What's your damn problem?" (With bonus fan that I really like)


This is Sweet Lorraine. This is the first machine I got when I moved out of my parents' because, well, Miss Hannah was the only machine I had. You can't fit a cast iron treadle in my car. I wanted one like my other great-grandmother had, and it turns out that there are tons of this make/model out there. (It's named after said great-grandmother, and also "Sweet Lorraine" is the name of a jazz standard.) They're not collectible, so I got it for shockingly little money. Right now we're rewiring it (the original 1939 wires were crumbly), but when it works it's the smoothest, easiest, most steadfast machine I have ever used.

You can see this kind of cable running along part of the back edge of the table. That's part of the mechanism that raises the machine. You know how with a lot of table-mounted sewing machines, you have to grab the machine and pull it up from under the table? Well, that cable connects the table's lid to the machine. So when you open the table lid, the machine rises up. I have to imagine that seeing the machine practically levitate into place when the salesman raised the table lid helped sell these machines.