Cams

My first sewing machine was heavy, solid metal, glazed aquamarine blue. It came with a set of cams for specialty stitches. I didn’t know what cams were and had to figure them out by trial and error. There were about 15 cams, red hard plastic round pieces with different shapes stamped on their tops and lower sections of different shapes. The top of the sewing machine had a trapdoor that lifted to reveal a metal post inside. To use, you picked the stitch you wanted by looking at the tops of the cams. You put the correct cam onto the post. It had to be pushed down so the bottom of the cam was firmly seated in reach of an arm with a roller on it. The sewing machine was set to zig-zag and the arm engaged to push against the side of the cam. As you sewed the cam would turn, moving the arm back and forth according to the shape of the cam. The result was a repeating stitch with varying width, decorative like embroidery but much faster. The only problem was uneven thread tension, which tended to smock the fabric instead of lying flat. I wasn’t decorating little girls’ dresses, so the cams sat unused until long after the sewing machine had bit the dust. My children sometimes played with them. I couldn’t bear to part with them; they were bright cherry red and a cool bit of history.