Sew What? - Albion Chieftain

If you've watched the videos at all, you'll have seen a big old teak veneered sideboard behind me. Very useful bit of kit. I restored that a couple of years ago and it was sat on a driveway, next to a skip, with a note on it saying FREE. A friend and I carried it home, just, and were grateful it wasn't any further away than a few yards. It doesn't come apart so you have to remove it in one lump. At some point, it had been upcycled with navy blue chalk paint and the rain had left it all watermarked.



Some time spent with a razor blade had the vast majority of the blue removed.



It revealed that there hadn't really been any prep work so the paint came off very easily. The only reason it seemed to have been painted was to modernise it and make it look more like cheap Ikea furniture. A couple of days later, it was almost done.



I finally had all the blue paint off and it was good enough to use. Then the protracted process of a house move began and it didn't get much further until the new house.  Also of note in this shot are two matching white glass lampshades, a charity shop find that were far cheaper than they had any right to be and now adorn the living room in the new house, being entirely period correct and perfectly proportioned for the room.



This piece was made by Avalon, and as far as I can find out it dates from somewhere around 1964-1972, I've not been able to find an original advert or similar for it, just other examples. It's not high end, more good quality mid-range furniture, and originally designed to be a dining room sideboard sort of a thing. I use it for storing a lot of my work equipment and as already mentioned, a backdrop for the videos, and it's great for both of these things. Once it was in the new house I stripped all the old finish off and revarnished it properly, and I'm really happy with the end result.

It's right at home with the other rescues in my home study/art studio. The little brown cupboard here is a sewing cabinet I picked up from Freecycle many, many years ago and got restored shortly after moving in to this house and a piece of furniture that gets a lot of use being very practical.  The dining chair is part of a pair and a drop leaf table that I collected with my old Rover 414, the table just fit in the boot and the two chairs just fit on the back seat.

I'm lowered as standard, so I have to modify my trousers to fit. Also take a look at an old Jones Model 105 sewing machine from probably the 1960s.

We have very similar tastes.
Despite being a 6"2 skinhead skateboarder I've had a 1950s singer for years. I don't use it much anymore but always used to alter clothes bought from charity shops etc, I even used it to repair my E30 interior.
I also have a house full of teak 60s furniture, many pieces laboriously stripped of "upcycled" chalk paint.

Mid-century furniture is my bag. I need to get some pics but I have a Ladderax unit in my living room, a Nathan dining table, a curved cocktail cabinet that opens into a mini-bar with a marbled top and a viewing window of the booze, 2 Ercol spindle-back chairs, a Polish ‘round wood’ chair, a Nathan telephone table.. even our bed and bedside tables are of a suitable 60’s vintage. And no ‘Shabby Chic’ ‘upcycling’ farrow and ball nonsense on any of it.

Next week's vid is going to be on how to get even more use out of a shirt I've had for eight years. You don't live in Yorkshire for any length of time without picking up a few habits.

That's the stuff. Makes for a great room partition and since we like our plants, it's the ideal sort of thing to be able to adjust shelf heights to accomodate them.

You could buy a new shirt, or you could spend a fraction of the cost and a little time to make that old shirt good again. A nice simple project this one, ideal for novices.

There's more woodwork to come in the future, I need a few tools and materials first and finances are directed elsewhere just at the moment so it'll have to wait a bit longer. Couple of sewing projects underway too, today I've been struggling to understand the directions in a reproduction 1930s pattern and after four attempts finally figured out the pockets only to find I didn't really like the design of them and will probably do them differently on the nice version.

I don't actually have that many projects to work on at the moment, it seems that during the pandemic I've been very good at turning my attention to completing existing projects rather than starting new ones, so that's a nice feeling. Got a few things lined up that I want to do but I really need to be able to go to an actual shop and handle materials to do it right. Soon though, right? Everything is slowly returning to normal so soon I'll be able to have fun doing charity shops and fabric shops and skip diving again.

Part 2 of the 1930s trouser series is up tomorrow. We'll be dealing with making belt loops and sewing the legs together, trying out a new (to me) technique for darts, and showing how to wind a bobbin on the Singer, I'll be sure to throw a link up in here when that's live, but if you're already subscribed you'll get a notification at 3pm Tuesday.

I've been having a fun time trying to get the correct drive belt for my sewing machine, something that I suspect was a fairly ordinary thing to get 60 years ago when the machine was pretty new, and is now a nuisance to find. Got messed around with my most recent attempt to buy the correct belt in the UK by someone that can't measure belts properly and eventually I resorted to getting a friend in the States to send me what measures as a correct belt (we hope). The belt I ordered from a UK seller cost almost three times what the one ordered from the States has and, even with postage, the one from the States is cheaper. That's absurd. More on that when the belt arrives, probably in a couple of weeks. You'd think a skinny V belt in an Imperial size would be easier to acquire, makes sense now why there's quite so many generic round profile rubber drive belts out there for sewing machines, I'd just rather do the job right with the proper belt.