Tips from the Great Depression

Sewing Machines - A Memory from the Great Depression

It may sound a bit weird, but if one is facing or enduring economic hard times, it is time if you don’t already have one, to buy a sewing machine.  Lots of money can be saved with a useful sewing machine.  It need not be a fancy one that does everything but buy the fabric, but it has to have three features:  go forward, at the flip of a switch go backward, and do adjustable width zigzag.

Going forward is obvious, so no need to comment on that.  Going backward means when sewing a seam, starting out about a half inch from where you want to start sewing, going backward for a few stitches, then forward will prevent the stitches from pulling apart.  The same is true at the end of the forward motion.  Taking a few stitches backward will prevent the same pulling apart at the end of the forward motion.  In the really olden days, one needed to tie the upper and lower ends of the threads together, which was a tedious and time consuming process.  Thus, the need for backward stitches.

Zigzag stitches are used in a variety of ways, and it takes practice to figure those out.  For this post, however, the most obvious one is mending holes in the kid’s pants!  Back and forth with a zigzag does the job nicely.

One other good tip from the Great Depression is to never buy contour sheets.  They are convenient, of course, but not a necessity.  When a flat sheet wears out in the middle, don’t put it in the rag bag.  Cut it down the very center, take the outer edges and overlap them so they make a flat seam, sew the edges down, of course, and then hem the new worn outer edges so they don’t rip.  Use this sheet for the top sheet only for comfort’s sake.  My own kids said they were in high school before they realized the top sheet didn’t have to have a seam down the middle.  They are all college graduates, so they were not permanently damaged by sleeping under a “turned sheet”, as these sheets were called.