The lady in Georgia, that is.  Shortly after I became disenchanted with the Singer 221/222 Featherweight, I stumbled upon her blog and her write-up on a strange-looking machine called the Elna Grasshopper, about which I knew nothing.

All I really knew about was vintage Singers, which were pretty much wall to wall here and still are.  But apparently this little green thing was the world’s first free-arm sewing machine.  Add to that a quirky design, Swiss precision engineering and the machine’s reputation for sewing a perfect straight stitch, and inevitably I had to have my first non-Singer machine.  So the search began, and before long I was opening a carton and pulling this out of it …

What we see here is a steel case measuring 14 x 12 x 6.5 inches which weighs 22lb, or if you prefer, one measuring 36 x 30 x17cm which weighs 10kg.  In other words, it’s much the same size and weight as the Singer Featherweight, and literally half the weight of a Singer 201K electric portable.

When you first see one of these in the flesh, so to speak, it starts sinking in just how different to any other sewing machine the Grasshopper really is – and that’s before you’ve worked out how to open the case.  You do that by pressing in on a couple of shiny buttons, one of which you can see on the left of that picture.  The lid then hinges up towards you, and there she is …

The machine itself simply lifts out of the case, which you can then do tricks with, but before we get to that, you need to know where I’m coming from, as people say nowadays.

When I first developed an interest in these machines, I was surprised how little there was about them on the internets.  Then I realised that’s not really surprising, given that only 60,000 or so of them seem to have been made.  To put that into perspective, in the years between the World Wars, Singer made far more of each model in their domestic range every 12 months than Tavaro made of this machine in 12 years.  Everybody’s granny did not have one of these.

I’ve still got things to learn about the Grasshopper, but up to a point, a rotary hook sewing machine is a rotary hook sewing machine.  What’s different with this one is mainly the detail engineering, which, being classic Swiss, is in a class of its own.

If you’re more up to speed with Elnas than I am at present, do please let me know if I get anything wrong – and if you’re more in the dark than I am, by all means ask questions.  You can email me or just add a comment by clicking on the speech bubble to the right of any post title, whatever makes you happy.

We’ll continue with this introduction to the Tavaro Nr.1 next time …