Bringing a hundred-year-old treadle machine back into daily use

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What it looked like when it came in

The stand is the usual pattern: an ornate cast-iron frame, a wide foot plate on a pivot, a large flywheel on the right and a thin rod joining the plate to a crank on the wheel. The machine head sits in a wooden cabinet that folds it down out of sight when it is not in use. From the shape of the shuttle and what little is left of the gold transfers, it was made in the years just before the First World War. I have not tried to date it more closely than that, partly because the transfers are too worn to read and partly because it would not change anything about how it sews.

The head was seized. Not rusted solid, as I first feared, but gummed. Decades of household machine oil had dried in every joint into a brown varnish, and the handwheel would turn about a quarter of a revolution before stopping as if it had met a wall. The leather belt was missing altogether. The foot plate was fine, the flywheel was fine, and the cabinet lid had a scorch mark from what looked like an iron put down in the wrong place long ago.

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Loosening the old oil

Freeing a gummed machine is mostly patience. I put a few drops of fresh, thin sewing machine oil into every hole and joint I could find on the head, rocked the handwheel back and forth as far as it would go, and left it overnight. Then I did the same again. By the fourth evening the wheel went all the way round with effort, and by the end of the second week it turned freely under one finger. The old oil came out of the joints as a dark liquid that I wiped off with rags, a surprising amount of it, and the rags went into a closed tin outside rather than the kitchen bin.

I did not take the head apart beyond the covers, the needle plate, the shuttle and the bobbin winder. Whatever I could reach I cleaned, and whatever I could not reach I oiled and worked until it moved. People who restore these machines properly strip them to the bare casting, and I can see why. I had neither the room nor the nerve, and so far the machine has not asked for it.

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A belt, and learning which way the wheel goes

A treadle belt is a length of round leather about five millimetres thick, joined into a loop with a small metal staple. It runs from a groove in the big wheel under the table, up through a slot in the cabinet and round the handwheel of the machine head. I fed a length round both wheels with the head tilted back, marked with a pencil where the ends met, and cut it about a centimetre short of the mark so that the loop would be tight once joined. It stretched over the first few weeks, and I have shortened it twice since.

The machine has to turn with the top of the handwheel coming towards me. Turned the other way, the thread jams in the shuttle within a few stitches. The flywheel below does not care which way it goes, and a treadle started with the feet alone will run either way depending on where the crank happens to be resting. The habit I had to build was to begin every seam by turning the handwheel towards me with my right hand and only then bring my feet in to keep it going. It took about a month before I stopped starting it backwards.

The rhythm of treadling is heel and toe, rocking the plate in a slow, even beat. It is easier to keep slow than it looks, and slow is what I wanted. At a comfortable pace the treadle makes roughly as many stitches a minute as an electric machine on its lowest setting, with the difference that I can stop within a stitch by stopping my feet.

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The first seam, and what it is good for now

The first thing I sewed on it was a pillowcase hem, and it came out straight, which surprised me more than it should have. The stitch is a plain lockstitch, forwards only, with no reverse and no zigzag. To secure the start and end of a seam I either leave long tails and knot them or turn the cloth round and sew back over the first centimetre. For the kind of mending I do, that is hardly ever a limitation. Patches, hems, bag seams and the long runs on a quilt backing are all straight stitching.

What it cannot do is buttonholes, stretchy fabrics or anything that needs a zigzag, and for those I either sew by hand or borrow the electric machine at the mending table. It does not mind heavy cloth in the least. I have put it through four layers of canvas on a bag strap without the needle hesitating, where the small electric machine I had before would stall and hum at two.