Hand Sewing and Sewing with a Sewing Machine
When I was 5 years old, a tailor came to our house and sewed my Sunday dresses in the ironing room on a Pfaff treadle machine. I always loved watching her, picking up the pins that had fallen to the floor, and marveling at how this little woman could conjure up such lovely outfits. She lived in a small half-timbered house in Brilon and had a hump. To me, she was a figure straight out of a fairy tale.
When I was 15, because I didn’t have enough allowance, I took down the red curtains in my room and used the sewing machine to make a skirt out of them. We had moved by then, no longer had an ironing room, and the treadle machine had been replaced with a not-so-great household machine that could barely handle sewing jeans seams.
Back then, I thought sewing was only possible with machines.
When I was 18 years old, it took me two months to learn how to sew by hand. I was taught by the master and bespoke tailor Schmidt from Wiemeringhausen. We also used sewing machines in the workshop: a treadle machine for quilting with horsehair batting, super-fast and sturdy industrial sewing machines—probably an Adler—and a machine for finishing fabric edges, known as an overlock machine.
Most of the stitching, however, was done by hand, either sitting at the table or, for some preparatory stitches, standing in front of it.
Every step involved in sewing a custom-made suit has its own special charm and requires specific skills. But hand-sewing was one of my favorite activities. A skilled hand can manage about 60 stitches per minute. It was in this highly professional environment that I came to know and appreciate hand-sewing.
I was an apprentice in the bespoke tailoring workshop for three years, working on many outstanding suits, cutaways, and even the occasional tailcoat. Eventually, I became the district champion, earned my journeyman’s certificate, and began working in the men’s tailor department at the Dortmund State Opera.
From there, I moved on from an assistant position in costume design to the Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie, where I began my studies in the fine arts in 1991.
Before the sewing machine was invented, people sewed by hand.
The needle is more than 40,000 years old. It is one of humanity’s oldest tools. It was used to sew decorative shells and similar items onto leather and to join such pieces together. Before fibers were twisted, tendons and fish bones were used as thread.
Through the process of twisting, cords and fringes could be made, objects could be joined together, and fish could be caught using knotted nets. The twisting of fibers—such as those from stinging nettles—was an important discovery and a milestone in human cultural history. The oldest known garment is a fringed skirt that was worn by women for approximately 20,000 years. Eventually, the heddle and the complex system of weaving were developed. People spun by hand, knotted by hand, wove, sewed, and embroidered.
The sewing machine was gradually developed over a period of more than 100 years by various men from Germany, England, Austria, France, and the United States. The American Elias Howe improved upon earlier models and thus invented the sewing machine as we still know it today. It works with a needle with an eye at its tip, a shuttle that moves beneath the fabric to form the lockstitch—that is, an upper and a lower thread—and an automatic fabric feed. Singer and the “Sewing Machine Combination” ultimately helped the sewing machine achieve its breakthrough.
Sewing machines were now mass-produced. The manufacturers and Howe became wealthy.
Sewing machines were also manufactured in Frankfurt. Joseph Wertheim founded the Deutsche Nähmaschinen Fabrik in Bornheim in 1863. By 1920, approximately 1.5 million sewing machines had been produced, most of which were exported to Australia and South America. As early as 1863, he set up his first sewing machine factory in Hanau, where 1,000 sewing machines had already been produced by 1865.
The first Pfaff sewing machine was sold by Georg Michael Pfaff in 1862. The G.M. Pfaff Sewing Machine Factory-Singer in Kaiserslautern was founded in 1880. Over time, both household and industrial machines were manufactured there.
In 1999, the company filed for bankruptcy. The household sewing machine division, along with the rights to the Pfaff brand, was acquired by the Swedish company Husqvarna Viking.
On March 6, 2013, the company was sold to the Chinese SGSB Group Co., Ltd., which also owns Dürkopp Adler GmbH, the former German competitor of Pfaff.
In addition to its main brand, Singer, the U.S.-based Singer Sourcing Limited LLC also uses the Pfaff and Husqvarna Viking brands for its portfolio of household sewing machines. Machines are manufactured in several countries in Asia and Latin America.
As of 2025: Following massive layoffs, the company in Kaiserslautern still employs 53 people in development, production, sales, and administration.
Adler sewing machines were manufactured in Bielefeld under the name Koch & Co. beginning in 1860. In 1876, the company became Dürkopp & Co. In 1990, Dürkopp and Adler merged to form Kochs Adler Nähmaschinen Werke, part of Dürkopp Adler GmbH, which manufactures industrial sewing machines.
Since 2005, Dürkopp Adler GmbH has also been a subsidiary of the Chinese Shang Gong Group Co., Ltd. (SGG), which, as mentioned, also includes Pfaff, KSL Keilmann Sondermaschinenbau GmbH, and Chinese sewing machine brands such as Butterfly.
Bernina sewing machines trace their origins to the invention of the hem-sewing machine in 1893 by Swiss inventor and entrepreneur Karl Friedrich Gegauf. Today, Bernina International AG is a privately held, globally active manufacturer of sewing and embroidery machines—primarily products for home sewing, overlock machines, and computer software for embroidery designs.
In my studio, I have a Bernina treadle machine, an Adler that I got from my mother-in-law, a Pfaff 260 with a motor added later (no table), and a fairly automated Pfaff Creative Expression 750, which I hope will last a long time.
But what was the situation like at the end of the 19th century for those who earned their living by sewing by hand? And if we go back even further in time, what about those who, before the textile trades were organized into guilds, invented the essential textile creations that adorn our lives?
It is not easy to find an answer to this. Most records and accounts of the people who sewed or were engaged in other crafts related to textile surfaces and garments can only be found during the era of industrialization—that is, long after the great agrarian reform, the enclosure movement, and the organization of these crafts by the guilds.
The accounts of cultural history as we know them were thus told from the perspective of the Industrial Revolution, when women had already lost—or were in the process of losing—a large part of their professional opportunities and legal rights.
In books such as Women’s Work by Elisabeth Wayland Barber, we can read about twisting, spinning, and weaving, and find a compelling summary in Sofi Thanhauser’s book Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, in which she discusses the economic aspects of textile production in detail. In Michèle Hayeur Smith’s book The Valkyries’ Loom: The Archaeology of Cloth Production and Female Power in the North Atlantic, we also read about women who, well into the 20th century, wove fabrics that served as currency. The introduction states: ....rather, it (the book) deals with the social archaeology of textiles and with textiles as a form of material culture that contains information about the societies that produced them. Textiles are like “text” (from which the term also derives) and tell a story of hardships and successes—and above all, of the lives of the women who made them.
Historians such as Merry Wiesner-Hanks and Martha Howell believe that women were increasingly excluded from the guild-based crafts during the 15th and 16th centuries. We know, for example, from letters written in ancient Assyrian in Assur that women produced textiles for long-distance trade, were paid for their work, were economically independent, and had a say in matters.
In the 19th century, only destitute and unmarried women were permitted to work, either in the emerging weaving mills or as seamstresses. This, in turn, suggests that women had always been professionally involved in this field, a point also made in the books mentioned above. We also know that the first industries were founded around weaving. The economic influences and impacts of textile production—how production methods shaped our social life and what role they played in the use of natural resources—are undoubtedly enormous. The textile arts, too, had long since been excluded from the canon of the arts.
The sewing machine then took over many of the jobs that had previously provided poor families with a livelihood—albeit a meager one. Some women rented a machine or fell into a debt trap when purchasing one. Self-employment eventually gave way to factory work.
Be that as it may, weaving and tailoring were associated with a lack of better alternatives; they were—and still are—linked to poverty and held in low regard.
“If it’s not a tailor, come on in” was a saying I thought about a lot when I began my tailoring apprenticeship after graduating from high school. I was paid very little—in my third year as an apprentice, barely more than in my first—and was entitled to a whole three weeks of vacation a year! Without my mother’s help, I couldn’t afford the rent for my small apartment, nor the groceries I needed to live.
At art school, sewing as a creative practice disappeared from my sights. Through a happy coincidence—and many years later in Dubai—I was able to rediscover sewing, and above all, hand sewing and with it the textile arts. Since then, I’ve been researching the countless and wonderful artisanal methods involving fibers and fabrics, drawing inspiration from them for my artistic practice, and passing on my knowledge to others.
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