My Aunt Yetta sewed quilts- and most of her family's clothes- on an antique treadle sewing machine that was powered by her foot. The next 50 years of technological innovation added electricity and the zigzag stitch and that was fine. As long as a machine could stitch patches of fabric to one another to create a quilt top (called piecing) and could sew together the quilt's bottom and top layers with batting in between (the actual quilting), we quilters could make our pretty blankets, quietly upgrading from one machine to another without missing a stitch. Today, though, if you open up a highend sewing machine, you'll find that inside it's eerily akin to your latest PC-jammed full of printed circuit boards, USB ports, memory cards, and user interfaces driven by touch screens.
展开▼
