The Tuck Marker Foot

That bag of attachments for the Singer 9W contained a foot I had never seen before:

I’m familiar with hemmers and binders and rufflers (oh my), but I had to study up on this one. I first checked this book, which is a comprehensive guide to all things sewing machine attachments:

The foot is called called a tucker or a tuck marker. Back in the days when clothing featured decorative tucks and other details, seamstresses needed a good way to mark the fabric so the tucks would be evenly spaced. Enter this little gadget. It’s a bit hard to see, but that bottom arm has a raised edge underneath. Once the proper distance between tucks has been established, the machine stitches the first tuck (on the other side of that spring) and the raised edge on that bottom arm marks a line on the fabric to indicate the position of the fold for the next tuck.

It always helps to see some of this machinery in action. This YouTube video has an excellent demonstration of a similar Singer-made foot being used on a 15-30 treadle.

(Side note—that treadle is gorgeous and I had never seen the owl decal set before.)

The tuck hemmer I have is a slightly different design than the tuck hemmer she is using in the video, but the concept is the same.

While surfing YouTube, I ran across Bernadette Banner’s channel, a young woman who specializes in historical costuming. She lives in New York City. The first video I watched was the one where she documented the creation of her sewing space in her tiny little apartment, including how she built a cutting table from a couple of Ikea dressers and a countertop. I have no desire to do historical costuming—and certainly not at the level she does it—but her videos are great fun to watch. I especially like the ones where she films her search of stores in the garment district when she is sourcing material for a new project. I will get to Mood Fabrics one of these days.

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I cut and sewed yesterday. I cut four more aprons and assembled two of them, although I was working on parts of all of them as I went along, sewing batches of all the pieces that needed thread of a particular color. I’ll add the new aprons to the store this weekend. The two I finished were from more of my chicken fabric. I think that may be the last of it, but I need to go through the fabric bins again. It’s a bit chaotic in my sewing rooms and things need to be cleaned up and re-organized.

And Vittorio, my Necchi BF, needs a spa day before I sew with him again. I have been working him hard. He has not complained, but he deserves a bit of pampering.

I’d also like to mess around with a different half-apron pattern, one that I think can be assembled mostly—perhaps entirely—on the serger. That’s mostly for curiosity’s sake.

The husband, I suspect, will be spending most of his day out in his new shop. I’ll be sure to take pictures if anything exciting happens.