...that I found in a box at an antiques market last week. The manufacturer is Josef Zimmermann
and they were extremely proud of their gold medal won at Barcelona in 1888 (when my grandparents were aged 14, 4, minus 1 and minus 8).
The little paper packet is still intact and opens out.
On the tab it shows that they were manufactured in Aachen.
Inside there is a fold of paper...
enclosing a dozen only very slightly rusty but still very sharp round shanked needles. Just the sort of thing that, had I been looking for them, I would never have found. But there they were, so I snapped them up.
This rather nice packet of needles was in a second hand shop. The price is in old money, so it is from 1971 or earlier,
and from the date on the back of the packet, 1964 or later.
One of these days I might finally understand needle sizes. I have a tendency to go blank at the sight of numbers. All my needles end up mixed up in the tin, so if it looks pretty fat I will use it with a thick thread, and if it looks thin, with a fine thread. If it hurts when I jab it into my fingertip, it's sharp, if it doesn't, it isn't. Not the technical approach, I know, but I've got away with it so far. This page of advice all about needles on Helen Howes's website is very interesting, but I'm just glad I haven't got to sit a written test on it. I'll just bash through the practical and hope for the best.
Suddenly (I hardly dare say this in case I jinx it) the weather is glorious. Months and months of cloud have given way to a few days of clear skies, which means it is the ideal weather for making videos. I spent a large chunk of yesterday dragging machines into the kitchen to make a visual guide on setting and threading the needle the right way. It's all about making sure that the needle makes the loop in the right place, which depends on the stitch-making mechanism. With long bobbin machines the shuttle has to pass though the loop: with round bobbin machines the loop is picked up by a hook and taken around the bobbin.
I also have to take advantage of this weather by catching up on over a year's neglect of the allotment, waging war on dandelions, nettles, brambles, bindweed and couch grass. If you spot grubby fingernails on videos, you will know why.
The problem with Jones machines is that they do not take a standard needle. Singer set the standard early on by giving the shank of the needle a flat side and a compatible slot in the needlebar for it to fit into. This meant that the needle was easy to insert and that it would be correctly set. Most manufacturers adopted this system, and the same standard needle is used on modern machines, so that it is easy to replace needles on most vintage machines. Jones continued to make machines which took a round shanked needle. There were four old needles with Maria's machine, a couple with tiny spots of rust, and all of them blunt. We tested the stitch with the least blunt of the four. The stitch was perfect, as perfect as you can get with a blunt needle that snags on the fabric every few inches. Maria is going to contact Helen Howes, who has a wonderful website, to get some replacement needles, then we will give the machine a proper run.
