sewing-machine

plural sewing-machines

1. datedDated form of sewing machine.

   The mother, a hard, hook-nosed creature, was doing up a bundle of overalls she had but finished at the sewing-machine.

   1888, Donn Piatt, “The Sales-Lady of the City”, in The Lone Grave of the Shenandoah and Other Tales, Chicago, Ill.; […]: Belford, Clarke & Co., →OCLC, page 88

   5 more examples

   The peculiarity of this invention consists in a means for varying the angle at which the plaiting-blade is held in the plaiter without varying the position of the entire instrument upon the sewing-machine.

   1873, Specifications and Drawings of Patents Issued from the U.S. Patent Office

   You are made fully aware of it before you have travelled the length of a single block in any of these East Side streets, by the whir of a thousand sewing-machines, worked at high pressure from earliest dawn till mind and muscle give out together.

   1890, Jacob A[ugust] Riis, “Jewtown”, in How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC, page 108

   In this she was only like millions of other Ordinary Women who are toiling over cooking-stoves, slaving at sewing-machines, pinching and economizing to educate and cultivate their children—digging with their own hands the chasm that will separate them almost as much as death.

   1907 January, Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, “The Ordinary Woman”, in The Holiday Cosmopolitan, International Magazine Company, page 348, column 2

   “. . . Beautiful like the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella” (Lautréamont).

   1932, This Quarter, volume 5, page 145

   This face-saving reminds us of some American ripostes a few months back when their space rockets seemed disinclined to leave the earth very far behind; after all, they said, the Russians are only chucking heavy machinery at the moon, whereas we're trying to be more sophisticated and get a sewing-machine up there.

   1961 March, “Talking of trains”, in Trains Illustrated, pages 129–130