Rearranging Again!

Will I ever get my sewing room just the way I want it? Unlikely, especially when you consider I snagged another vintage machine to play with this week! DH and I had gone thrift store shopping (my favorite type of shopping aside from online) We went to this thrift store we had never been to, and in the corner I spied a sewing cabinet.

Of course I had to see what was in it, and it turned out to be a Singer 99K. Hmmmm...tempting...How much?....$40....This machine is definitely coming home with me for $40! DH is so sweet, and as soon as he saw it, he asked if I wanted it, before he even saw the price. Even more a sign of his awesomeness, he insisted we drop it off for servicing while we were out, so the technician could make sure all the wiring was safe, and rewire if necessary. The technician was surprised I bought a 99K in a cabinet, and when I got home and did a little research, I found out why. It seems cabinets for 3/4 sized machines are rare indeed, and in all likelihood, the cabinet may be worth more than the machine.

I started researching cabinets after I found out how rare they are, and I am really confused now. The ISMACS site says there was only one cabinet made by Singer for the 99K, and this isn't it. I did a google image search for 99K cabinets, and I found a couple others in this style, but none this color, they were all dark. I am sure this is the original color. I did not take a photo of the machine before we dropped it off, but I did look up the serial number on my I-phone just as we were carrying it into the sewing shop. My machine is a 1957, which makes sense with this color cabinet. My parents still have the dressers they had when they got married, and they are just this color, and they were married in 1958. The cabinet has no markings on it at all, so I am wondering if perhaps there was another company making cabinets for Singer machines?

At any rate, I really want to play with the 99K when it comes home next week, and I need some more time with my 221  Singer Featherweight, but it's hard to use them when they are not set up. This is where the rearrange came in. I've spent lots of time in my sewing room this week, but moving pretty slow because of the mumps, so I had lots of thinking time. I needed frequent breaks from whatever I was doing, so I would just sit in the sewing room and look around. I realized if I blocked off part of the doorway, which is large, I could move my sewing cabinets around and have more machines set up at once.

Here I moved a cabinet to partially block  the entry to the room, and I have the cabinet opening to the hallway, so I could use the back of the cabinet as a sort of extended wall area.

Now my Juki 98QE is right when you enter the room, and I put the back leaf down. Under the leaf towards the far wall, there is a microwave cart underneath it, which fits when I remove the wheels. The smaller leaf has the plastic drawers under it that you can see in the foreground.

Here is the leaf up, so you can see there is room to have it up.  My problem it those bookcases on the right belong to my daughter (DD#2), and she is an Amazon bookseller. She must have access to those shelves. She only has four sets of shelves in my sewing room, I donated one wall to the cause. In her bedroom there is a maze of bookshelves, and she has somewhere between ten and twelve sets in there. She basically sleeps in a bookstore.

Because of the book issue, I will only raise the back leaf when I am quilting, but the Juki cabinet is fully functional where it sits now.

I moved my Bernina Aurora 440 where my Juki had been, and now I have an adjustable height table with my Featherweight, and the new-to-me Singer 99K cabinet on the backside of the Bernina cabinet. The Singer 99 cabinet looks so sad with no machine in it! It should be back in a few days.

Here is the Bernina side of the arrangement. I think with my Ott lite in the middle, it can be used with all three of these machines. I'll have to try it out.

This section of my sewing room stayed pretty much the same.

I am not liking the view of the back of that cabinet, so I think a small wall quilt is needed to cover the fiberboard backing. I had to stack my white strip drawers. They had been under the Juki back leaf when it was in it's previous location, and always up. Please forgive the messy surfaces, I had to move a LOT of stuff today, and I just got too tired to deal with the last of the piles.  Most of the stuff on my sewing cabinets are current projects, and my cutting table has a bunch of fabric from several projects I am currently cutting. At times the room will look worse than this, and I'm hoping at times it will be better. I haven't finished moving little things like trashcans yet either. I think the ironing board is going to have to go up only when I need it. I think I will likely use a small pressing board when I am working on blocks, and only bring out the ironing board for yardage or when I am assembling a quilt top.

I'm anxious to see how this arrangement will work for me. I'd love to have a different project going at every machine, and I could pick and choose what I wanted to work on each time I was going to sew. I ordered some bobbins for my 99 today, it only came with one, but at least the bobbin and bobbin case were there! The machine moved freely, and the wiring looked to be in good shape, so I'll be surprised if the motor has major issues. It can be converted to a handcrank if it has a bad motor, and I've been wanting a handcrank, so even that would be OK.