sewing-machine

sewing-machine (plural sewing-machines)

1. Dated form of sewing machine.
   • 1873, Specifications and Drawings of Patents Issued from the U.S. Patent Office:

     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.

   • 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:

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

   • 1890, Jacob A 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:

     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.

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

     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.

   • 1932, This Quarter, volume 5, page 145:

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

     A translation of canto six from Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror.

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

     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.

   • 1990, Rosamunde Pilcher, September, Thorndike, Me.: Thorndike Press, →ISBN, page 324:

     The solid table on which stood the sewing-machine was also useful for cutting out and dressmaking, and the ironing-board and the iron stood ready for instant use.