They Don't Make 'em Like They Used To

With two horses to feed, I found myself with a mountain of plastic woven feed bags, piling up in the barn and garage - not being able to merely throw them away.

Since feed bags went from paper to woven plastic, I could no longer use them for recycling.

I figured that I would transform them into something useful. The first thing that came to mind was shopping totes.

Hopefully, this would cut down on the other mountain of those awful plastic supermarket bags, ever growing, in the garage.

I had a nice sewing machine from years ago, but was pretty sure that trying to punch through the plastic and nylon webbing, it wouldn't last very long.

Searching ebay, I found a fine lookin' 1952 Singer 15-91 that looked like it would do the job.

I won the auction and the machine was promptly shipped.

It was a beautiful machine - looked to be well cared for and purred like a happy kitten.

After fiddling around wit tensions and threading, she sewed like a pro!

Fashioning shopping totes from plastic feed bags was a bit of a challenge, to start, but I managed to make up a couple of dozen. Wasn't puttin' a dent in my pile of bags, though. Making a bag was also much more time consuming than I had thought.

I then thought it'd be neat to find a vintage Singer cabinet. Heading to town, I was thinking, "Wouldn't it be cool to find a vintage Singer Model #42 cabinet, appropriate for my Singer 15-91?

Arriving at the S.A. Store, I walked through the front door, and lo and behold, there to my left was a vintage, deco Singer #42 cabinet. What were the odds?

It was missing the two hinges that held the machine, and had seen better days, finish wise, but for the price, I scooped it up anyway.

After a later search on ebay, I found a couple of hinges and set to thinking about repairing some of the missing veneer and giving it a new finish.

Definitely an improvement!