When we brought home an antique White Family Rotary treadle sewing machine from a thrift store last year, I thought it would be just like great-granny’s old Singer I’d used as a child. After we ...

Pictured is my Singer treadle sewing machine dating to about 1901, previously my mother's and my grandmother's. Many inventors modified and improved sewing machines through the 1800s. Elias Howe and ...

to fashion fuzzy coats, couch covers and zippered pencil bags. I’d sit on the floor and watch as her feet deftly pedaled fast on the straightaway and then slowed as she rounded a curve or reached an ...