Vintage Sewing With Ancient Aliens

more about this lady later

I may or may not be able to attend the NC TOGA (Treadle On Gathering and Academy) in June.  My buddy Art calls it sewing machine summer camp.  But I have been thinking about what I might take to sell at the swap meet portion of it.

Machines, obviously.  Then I thought about thinning the herd of vintage sewing goodies.  And I had to confront a DREADFUL FACT for the first time.

I cannot part with them, and that fact makes me a collector.

OK, those of you that know me can stop laughing now.  Yes, I have 100+ sewing machines in the house.  But I am NOT a collector of sewing machines.   Really, I mean it.  I like fixing them up and they accumulate, that is all.  There are very few of them that I would not part with under the right circumstances.  I can prove this:  see the last post about the gorgeous near-mint PINK 15-clone that went to Barbara.

Yes, I have a LARGE studio stuffed to the gills with fabric, tools, accessories and other goodies.  But they are all meant to be used and shared.  Collecting = hoarding, not sharing.  I can prove this too:  vintage sewing books, Greist hemmers, and more than one skirt marker (among other things) have gone to various sewing buddies.

Before this week I would have said that the only things I collect are Folkwear patterns.  I have been buying them since the company began back in the 70's.  I have almost all of them.  They never leave the house (never loaned out, ever, no matter how much I like you.  So there.)  I have made many things from them in the past but mostly I just want to own them.

So now I have to face the fact that I also collect wooden vintage sewing thingys.  And last week I hit the jackpot at my favorite thrift shop.  I first spied the scissor-holder-becomes-duck thingy which was IDENTICAL to one I found a couple of months ago.

Then I spotted a similar duck shaped thread-but-not-scissor thingy.  AHA, perhaps someone cleaned out a sewing room.

Quickly found a couple more pieces, including another ducky scissor holder, although it needs a spot of glue and a replacement for a pin cushion.

obviously needs some vintage scissors

The piece-de-resistance was the gray alien doing her mending.

I absolutely adore the TV show Ancient Aliens.  The premise is that aliens from other planets have visited Earth throughout the ages influencing our development.  I don't take it seriously, in fact I usually fall out of my chair laughing several times during each episode.  It is deliciously ridiculous.  I love the unexplained ancient mysteries (ever heard of Puma Punku?) and love the extensive video footage of places like Nazca.  I love the fractured logic by which they decide that all the advances of human civilization can be explained by aliens.  But instead of ancient aliens, I think that ancient humans were capable of all of this stuff.

One of the ancient alien theories concerns a group called "the grays".  And another theory is that aliens came down here and were so smitten with the hot Earth girls that they mated with them and therefore we are descended from them.

Why did it have to be just hot Earth girls though?  (Perhaps because most of the people who believe this stuff are guys living in their parents' basements?  Just a thought).  Why couldn't the girl aliens have been smitten with the hot Earth stud muffins?

So this is my theory about "Tuesday mending".  Gray girl alien comes to Earth, finds a lovely guy, marries him and adapts to our culture.  Does her mending.

It's the only logical explanation.  The piece was made in Yugoslavia (before it fractured into several separate states), but I have known people from Yugoslavia and none of them were gray.