The Needlebar Archives at ISMACS
Over the past few years I’ve been saddened to watch a variety of antique and vintage sewing machine collector websites disappear from the internet as the owners passed on without making allowances for the future. When Enrico of Fiddlebase.com fame passed, I quickly reached out to his son to make sure the site was saved. Thankfully he decided to both keep and upgrade the site as a tribute to his father’s work. I then started archiving sites. Nothing I would ever publish so long as the information was available, but just to ensure that it didn’t disappear. Needlebar was one of the bigger sites to first be scaled back due to server issues, and to then disappear when Alan Quinn, the founder of the site, passed. After two years of effort trying to contact Alan and then his descendants, I made the decision to post what I had collected, for the sole purpose of saving the years of hard work that he and the other contributors had created.
Please be aware that ISMACS is a non-profit, run by volunteers on a shoestring budget. We are not making money from the Society. However, if your work is posted here and you wish us to take it down for copyright reasons, please email me at “chair at ismacs dot net” and we can have that discussion. All copyright notices have been left in place in the archived versions, as Alan originally included.
Meanwhile, this is our attempt to save as much of a comprehensive and valuable resource as we can.
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Calvin Armerding
Chair, International Sewing Machine Collectors Society