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Janice Schick is so passionate about vintage sewing machines, to get one she once found herself in a situation right out of a slasher flick.

In 2018, she saw an ad on Facebook Marketplace offering a range of items available at an abandoned house — appliances, furniture, typewriters — near Greenwood and Danforth, not far from Schick’s apartment. One thing caught her eye: a 1950s era Singer 191 sewing machine, in cast-iron black, a model so rare, she compares it to an eight-track tape player.

(Read about other interesting collections like Mark Henderson’s Hollywood nostalgia and “the world’s weirdest recycling centre” at SkullStore.)

“I met the realtor at this house that was all gutted, the power was out,” she recalls. “As we’re going down to the basement, I’m thinking, ‘I’m the dumb girl in the horror movie who gets killed in a haunted house.’”

Fortunately, she survived — and bought the machine — but the adventure demonstrated to Schick, who works as a law clerk for an insurance company, the lengths she’ll go to add to her collection.

Schick’s apartment is packed with nearly 40 machines. All of them functioning and in such vivid colours as light pink and green, they stand in display cases, on a bookshelf or atop her wardrobe. Books such as “Vintage Couture Tailoring” and “Techniques of Japanese Embroidery” share space on the shelves.

In her living room sits an art-deco Singer sewing table, made from mahogany veneer, on which Schick fixes and cleans some of the machines she buys from collectors she mostly meets online.

For Schick, it’s only natural that she’s been collecting vintage sewing machines for the past 15 years. “Growing up in Chilliwack, B.C., we all learned to sew, and my mom often made our own clothes,” she says. “Today my wardrobe is probably half things I made myself over the past couple of years. Basically, in our family, if you didn’t sew, you were a loser.”

It’s also their beauty that attracts her. “I didn’t realize how many patterns and designs they can have on their bodies,” she says. “And I like vintage stuff, always have. I have no interest in modern sewing machines, often made with cheap plastic parts inside.”

She holds up a blazer made from silk organza fabric. “The lapels and collar alone took me the first season of ‘X Files,’” she says.

Schick gestures toward her kitchen’s Roman blinds, sewn from a dazzling red fabric peppered with colourful flowers. “Yeah, I made those too,” she says, “and my living room blinds.”

All but one of her machines are electric, and she says three-quarters of them originally worked to some degree but had to be spruced up or rewired or had parts that needed replacing. “A few were completely locked up, because lint collects around where the bobbin is underneath the bobbin plate. If it’s not cleaned out it gets compressed with time and old oil so it hardens like granite," she says. “Those are more challenging, but I’ve learned a lot.”

The machines in her collection, for which she has paid between $15 and $150, feature a range of decorations, such as the Singer 66’s intricate red and green pattern called the “Red Eye.” She bought it in 2018 from a woman in Michigan who met her in Sarnia in a Tim Horton’s parking lot.

Schick points out another Singer classic, the 127, dubbed the “Sphinx” because of its golden images of the mythical Egyptian creature. Also bought in 2018, this machine cost only $15 at a local Value Village. “It was an absolute mess,” she says. “I had to use a paint scraper to get the old, hardened grease off of the moving parts underneath and just put a different motor on it because the wiring was taped together.”

Among her machines are a few from the early 20th century, like the Singer 27 from 1903. She recently bought an 1885 Singer with a fiddle base, its bottom resembling a stringed instrument. What also makes this one unique is its treadle, which is powered mechanically by a foot pedal pushed back and forth.

In addition to Facebook Marketplace, she scans eBay and a Facebook group for sewing machine collectors. “There is such a strong community of collectors out there and we try to get together over Zoom every Friday,” she says. “We talk about and work on our machines or projects. It’s like a virtual old-fashioned sewing bee.”

Asked if there’s any particular machine she’d like to own, she shares a frequent lament of collectors, especially those living in small apartments. “I actually need more space,” she says. “It’s getting really packed in here.”

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