Sewing Machine Project Volunteer Day

Our Sewing Machine Project volunteer day started just shortly after 8am this morning in the community room of a local church. Louie and I, and Jack and Polly traveled to Madison Friday afternoon to spent the night, so we would be well rested when we started our day.

Here we are just getting settled in before the volunteers started coming to help us.

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There were new machines, modern machines, and vintage machines. There were also sergers.

Please forgive all the photos of me. My husband was manning the camera.

I preferred working on the old vintage machines as those are what I am most comfortable working on.

Louie and Jack worked on sewing machines, and were also ‘runners’, taking machines away and getting more to work on. They did an awesome job of checking over the machines.  Now that I know Louie did such an awesome job on the machines he worked on, I can put him to work with me when I am working on them at home…. (if I can get away with it.)

My silly brother Jack made a face at me when he saw the camera. What a goof! Jack has been working on sewing machines for awhile now, and longer than Louie, but then, he is a ‘Jack of all trades’ and can fix just about anything.

This is Margaret Jankowski, founder of the Sewing Machine Project, and Polly, (Jack’s wife).  I don’t know why I couldn’t get decent lighting on these two pictures.

Margaret and Polly were in charge of inventorying, tagging, and data entry of the finished machines before they moved to the next destination…the truck, or the storage room.

Louie was particularly interested in working on this machine. It is a Pfaff 360. He was interested because we just bought one off Craigslist a week or so ago, and we haven’t worked on it yet. Now he has experience so he can work on mine!

We had a lot of wonderful volunteers. Not everyone worked on machines. There were lots of tasks that needed to be done, and everyone did it with a smile.

I think there were over 70 sewing machines on this truck when were were finished for the day.

There were also a few sergers. Many more sewing machines were tested and put in another storage area. Over 125 machines were worked on, and inventoried today. We had 25-30 volunteers. A reporter from the Wisconsin State Journal came and took pictures. Here is HIS story.

We cleaned up our mess, put everything away, and called it a day about 5 pm.

….and we felt SEW blessed to have been a part of this wonderful day. We can’t wait for the next one!