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The pattern pieces that make a sewing machine

A Singer sewing machine taken back to bits

In his book, Things come apart, Todd McLellan takes everyday objects, breaks them down into their constituent parts, lays them out and photographs them. These images highlight the hidden complexity of the products around us. Take a sewing machine, for example. We see a smoothly moulded plastic (or on industrial machines a cast steel) shell that hides the numerous mechanisms and components that can take two separate and continuous threads and make a linear connection between two panels, or in simpler terms stitch two things together.

At Thread, we often (well, not that often but probably more than the typical person) talk about how brilliant a sewing machine is and so we particularly liked to see it carefully disassembled. Not so keen on the picture that followed this one of the sewing machine seeming to explode though.

If you look carefullly to the bottom right hand corner of the main shell you can see 12 sewing pins. Pins always get everywhere so I’m not surprised to see that they got inside the sewing machine!