From The Archives: 10.28.2019

An entry salvaged from the archives of my previous blog. Originally posted October 28th, 2019.

My roommate owns a sewing machine. I have been kindly given permission to use it pretty much whenever she's not. This machine is a 1977 Sears Kenmore 1625 behemoth that, judging from the weight, has been carved out of a single block of solid steel. His name is Pierre.

Pierre runs quite well for a chunky monstrosity approaching middle age, but apparently he was a secondhand find, and sometime over the past 42 years all of the presser feet that were not attached to the machine have gone AWOL. This is kind of a little bit important, more so after I watched my poor roommate try to put boning into a ball gown bodice by hand.

Presser feet are the little widgets that hold the fabric down onto the feed dogs -- the little tank treads that walk the fabric away from you as you sew -- and the size and shape of them determine what kind of stitches you can use, and what happens when they clamp down on the fabric. You can get all kinds of trick feet that overlock like a serger, fold the edge over to auto-hem fine fabrics, or the one said roommate really could have used, have a hinged base and only one prong so you don't have to engage in mortal combat to get the damn zipper to fit underneath.

Forty-two years is approximately four eternities in small appliances time. Sears Roebuck has declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Kenmore doesn't make any of its own stuff anymore, and sewing machines have gone from electromechanical to mainly electronic. Pierre takes universal needles, thank GOD, but who the hell knows if any of his innards and accessories are even manufactured anymore.

By some miracle, Pierre's owner actually has his manual, or at least a photocopy of it. It seems to have all the pages, including a parts list in the back. Happily, Googling the parts number for his zipper foot gets me a hit on a Sears parts page.  Unhappily, the part is no longer in stock. It appears to be extinct.

The page feels the need to specify that's a "low shank" zipper foot, which sets off alarm bells. Nobody puts modifiers like that into a database entry without a reason. I know zero things about presser feet, other than what they do when they're on the machine, but the picture of a "low shank" foot didn't particularly look right. I go take a look for "presser foot" and "shank" and, while I find neither sewing machine-related porn nor entertaining stories of prison murders over crafting supplies, I do find out that there are two different heights of leg on these things. A low shank attaches about 3/4" up from the strike plate, and a high shank attaches 1" up.

I went out to the living room to measure Pierre. The number I got was... not either of those. I would compliment Pierre on his uncommon length, but my roommate tells me he was named after a gay French pirate, so he probably wouldn't appreciate it from me.

I go back to Google, and mainly what I find is that Sears is out of stock on literally every small object that has ever contributed to building one of these machines. Nothing on the internet ever really dies, and I watch enough of Techmoan and Retro Recipes and 8-Bit Guy to know that if it's old and gizmo-y, then someone, somewhere has made a sideline out of hoarding spare parts for one of these things in their garage.

Tried a few sewing suppliers. No luck. They directed me to specialty stores for vintage sewing machines. None of them had any "Kenmore super-high shank" feet either, although one of them did helpfully tell me that Pierre's proper model number is 158.1625, which isn't on the manual cover. Good to know his full legal name, I guess; now we can shout the whole thing whenever he gets into trouble.

So then I tried reddit, which is the best and worst of the internet all rolled into one. I figured either they would call me a fake geek girl ("beta cuck loser" is usually for male-majority subs, which a sewing sub probably wasn't) and try to doxx me, or be fucking brilliant.

Reddit wasn't fucking brilliant, but they did point me at people who were. It turns out that people who are into vintage Kenmore sewing machines are really really REALLY into vintage Kenmore sewing machines, and they hold their secret cult meetings on Facebook. They're a very nice cult, and linked me to a place that had the Holy Grail I was looking for, an adapter so Pierre could get with the times and wear modern (read: cheap and easy to obtain) presser feet like everyone else. It cost $13, which is probably more than my roommate originally paid for Pierre, but it does mean she can now buy a set of a dozen presser feet for all occasions for about $14.95.

He also needs the clutch on his bobbin winder replaced, which is probably eventually going to be my job, since I'm the most likely to own a set of tiny screwdrivers and have any idea what the hell I'm doing. But that is another quest for another time.