Abstract :
My Aunt Yetta sewed quilts- and most of her family´s clothes- on an antique treadle sewing machine that was powered by her foot. The next 50 years of technological innovation added electricity and the zigzag stitch and that was fine. As long as a machine could stitch patches of fabric to one another to create a quilt top (called piecing) and could sew together the quilt´s bottom and top layers with batting in between (the actual quilting), we quilters could make our pretty blankets, quietly upgrading from one machine to another without missing a stitch. Today, though, if you open up a highend sewing machine, you´ll find that inside it´s eerily akin to your latest PC-jammed full of printed circuit boards, USB ports, memory cards, and user interfaces driven by touch screens.