Before I get to yer daily dose o’ blather, thank you to Mac and Our Northern Correspondent Paulette (see yesterday’s comments) for setting me straight about the rail in yesterday’s photoooo. It seemed crazy to me that something like that could migrate all the way over from the Back Bay. I do remember the Stevens’s lighthouse-style boathouse and being sad that it burned down. My memory isn’t clear about any rails being involved but I was very young then and it rings a bell that this is the correct explanation for where that rail came from. Thank you both.

Okay, I have been awash in confusion about sewing musheens all day. This is not really the appropriate venue to go into why. All I will say is that my mother was a trained seamstress and accounting for and appropriately distributing sewing musheens is part of my life right now. But not all of the sewing musheens I have been thinking about today belonged to The Commander…

Without further ado:

1. The beauteous old black Singer. The one with the gorgeous wood cabinet and the fancy gold decorations all over it. I don’t have any pictures of it but you’ve probably seen one somewhere. Maybe your grandmother’s house or a Normal Rockwell illustration. My dad bought that sewing musheen for The Commander back when they were newly married and rattling around the southwest while he taught Army Air Corps recruits how to fly airplanes during WWII. I can remember The Comm sewing stuff on that thing throughout my whole childhood and I made a few loverly (or sometimes not ;-)) outfits for myself on it. This one has been at the moomincabin for years and I am reluctant to do anything with it for a while.
2. The 1960s Singer — *not* black with gold decorations. I can’t remember why she bought this one. Does it have a zig-zag stitch? I think so but I can’t remember. It was a good musheen though and I remember using it to sew clothes… I have found a home for this musheen. It is old but The Comm took good care of it and my hope is that it will live on for while at least.
3. The Comm’s serger… I don’t know what to do with this. I will probably “adopt” it for the moment but I’m not sure I will use it.
4. My old Singer featherweight. Cute little black Singer that I sewed lots of stuff on. The Commander bought me this one when I was in high school so I could have my own sewing musheen and not use hers all the time. It was wonderful. Alas, there came a day when I bought a new musheen and after years in the dank dark gray-green greasy limpopo Landfill Dungeon, I am not sure that it will ever be usable again. I am sad about that.
5. My Viking, the basic musheen that the GG bought me when I decided I needed something that could do a zig-zag stitch. Uh, basic sewing musheens do zig-zag (and probably more) now. Also, was the Singer feather-weight acting up? Because I had Grandma Sally’s White over here for a while. She definitely wanted that back though and so the Viking. Which has had a *lot* of use! But not recently as I have shifted my focus to de-acquisitioning.
6. Mouse’s Viking, the basic sewing musheen I bought her when she was in college. How many college students do you know who have a sewing machine and a *spinning wheel* in their dorm room?
7. Dogmomster’s serger. Why did I include that? Because she gave / loaned it to Mouse a few years back.
8. My dream musheen: A couple of years ago, for about a week, I was in love with a fancy sewing musheen at our loverly Viking store that would do musheen quilting and I dunno what else. Maybe wash the dishes? I squelched my desire. It wasn’t hard to do that because the dern thing cost something like $2500! It was a good thing, because not too long after that, my de-acquisitional phase began.

So those are the sewing musheens that I know and love. And then there are the looms and the spinning wheels… Not tonight.

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