vintage dress n patterns

more sewing cabinets

If you visit the apartment of a creative friend who works from home, you'll probably see whatever project they're currently working on all over their desk. Stacks of paper, sketches, Pantone books, fabric swatches. We live in a time where work and leisure hours have blurry boundaries, we multitask, and we let our projects all hang out, visitors be damned.

In the past it was different, of course; societal rules dictated you cleaned up your pig-sty if company was coming over, and work and leisure were two different things. A household task like sewing fell into the "work" category, it was meant to be focused on a few hours at a time and then put away. And furniture design of the time reflected that with some pretty neat design solutions.

Take the Mid-Century-Modern-looking table above, for instance. It appears an ordinary endtable, but as we shall see it has some surprising design features.

First off, what appears to be a drawer in the front, one that you'd assume occupied the same depth as the table, isn't a drawer at all; it's a flip-out panel containing small bins.

Next you might notice the odd, subtle bevel along the front edge, which it turns out is there to give your fingers purchase. The top surface turns out to be two layers of material, the top one liftable.

On the other side you see this felt-tipped metal bar embedded in the table.

As you lift the tabletop on its hinge, an internal spring is released and the bar pops out of its nesting position.

The bar, it turns out, is to support the tabletop. And because what was the top of the table is now the bottom, the bar is tipped in felt to avoid marring the surface at the point of contact.

Now the narrow endtable has effectively doubled its work surface.

Looking at the cutout area now revealed in the tabletop, it becomes obvious why the front of the table is not a drawer. The interior is occupied by a sewing machine stored in a horizontal position.

The front panel flips open.

Now the machine can be grasped around the neck and lifted upwards. It is attached to the rear of the table by two hinges which it hangs from in the stored position.

After the front panel is flipped back down...

...the machine now has the support it needs to "stand."

This sewing machine, by the way, has a cast-iron body and weighs nearly 30 pounds, which was common in the first half of the 20th century. Yet the intended users were women ranging from teenage girls to grandmothers who would not possess the strength to lift such a machine. To address this, a support spring was added to the inside.

This black metal panel was attached to the spring and supports the weight of the machine during the hoisting process.

The spring can be calibrated to perfectly counterbalance the weight of the machine. Once it's perfectly tuned, lifting the machine into its working position is nearly effortless.

You'll see the bed of the machine is just about level with the table surface, which allows the smooth sliding of fabric across both surfaces.

Lastly, underneath the table is a metal lever on a hinge.

The lever can be lowered into a vertical position and is attached to the sewing machine's motor controller.

When seated in the operating position, the lever stays just to the side of your knee. By shifting your leg slightly and pressing the lever, you control the sewing action and speed of the machine, leaving both hands free to manipulate the material.

Even the attendant stool serves a dual purpose: The top lifts off to provide access to storage space beneath the seat.

This table is Singer's No. 71 Cabinet, by the way. The stool is also a Singer, and though it belongs to a different cabinet model and has different legs, the storage feature is identical.

In these period advertising shots, you can see how seamlessly the cabinet was meant to blend into the households of the 1940s and '50s.

It'd be nice if we had something similar for our home computers and work detritus. But these days, it seems, work is never meant to be put away.

vintage sewing cabinets

THE BRILLIANT UNSUNG DESIGN OF SINGER'S NO 74 "SPINET" CABINET FOR SEWING MACHINES:

Most classic sewing tables have a central and glaring ergonomic flaw that few have attempted to tackle with design. The flaw arises from an unskillful negotiation between what the user needs and what the physical dimensions of the table provide.

The central problem is that a sewing machine operator should be centered on the needle of the machine, which is off to the left side. They must be able to clearly see what the needle is doing and use both hands to guide the fabric. But most sewing tables are trying to fit a 15-inch wide machine in an unobtrusive footprint, so the designers would center the machine in a table scarcely wider than the machine itself. Thus, when the operator sits at the table and places their legs in the space allotted, they are centered on the machine itself and must lean to the left to get their noses in line with the needle. If you shift your seat over to be centered on the needle, you hit your left leg on the left table leg. I wonder that there's not a generation of 20th-century women with S-shaped spines.

One table that actually addressed this problem, tackled it with creative design, and even added some Mid-Century Modern flair is Singer's No. 74 "Spinet" Cabinet, which is shaped like a trapezoid.

The front panel swings open to the right...

...allowing you to pull the table's left-side support, including the front left leg, out to the side.

The top can then be flipped to the left, coming to rest on the moveable leg.

Getting the front left leg out of the way centers the operator on the needle and provides more generous legroom.

The trapezoidal shape of the top provides a slight wraparound effect when open. Additionally, since the open tabletop is now resting on an actual table leg rather than a swing-out metal bar, it has more significant support. Lastly, the trapezoidal shape looks stylish as heck when it's all closed up.

I consider this design an all-around winner, and am surprised that we never looked at transforming mid-century furniture like this in our History of Industrial Design classes at school. And sadly, the original designer's name is unknown.

BELOW WE SEE SINGER CABINET NO 71 AGAIN ONE OF THE UNSUNG DESIGNS

As we'll see here, bigger ain't always better.

The nice thing about Singer's No. 71 Cabinet is that it looks nice whether open or closed. The workings of its mechanical parts are largely invisible no matter where in the opening process you are.

In contrast, this gargantuan wall cabinet looks hideous and ill-considered the second you open the doors. Not exactly how I'd want to start off an activity.

A dual-level table flips out of the cabinet.

Inside are tilted spool holders.

While at first that seems a good use of space, I question the way they're arrayed; it seems it would be more effective if you could see everything at a glance, rather than having the spools in front obscure the colors of the spools in the back. And the ones off in the corner seem they'd be hard to reach.

The storage provided below doesn't seem any better-considered; it appears designed to hold large, bulky items rather than the variety of small objects required in sewing.

Another huge cabinet whose design I find curious is this one:

It seems unwieldy as heck, but the whole thing is meant to be pulled open. Seems heavy, and I wonder how stable it is on just those four legs.

Inside it's got huge spool pins probably meant for yarn rather than thread, and flip-out drawers.

If you look closely you can see the dowel the drawers pivot around. And while they initially seem neat, on second thought I question their efficacy; the position of the dowel pivot requires leaving a space between the drawers, so that they can clear each other while opening, so that space in between them is essentially dead space.

The prettiest of the large cabinets I've seen also appears to be the oldest:

Labeled "Corticelli," it appears to be a POP display for thread.

Save for the bottom-most drawer, the pull-out drawers have thick glass fronts, and if you look at the sides of the insides of the drawers, you can see the drawer bottoms are stepped and angled, probably to increase visibility.

The top appears to be solid oak so this thing must weigh a shit-ton. (For you European readers, that's an American unit of weight roughly equivalent to your metric ton.)