For the last few months, we’ve been working with leather more and more. With one of the benefits of the material (it’s rigidity and thickness) come hurdles when you want to design with it. Namely, the ability to sew it together properly.
We’ve been in the market for getting a new machine that would handle the weight and amount of leather we’ve been working with and found out about a great little place up in Toledo, OH called (quite applicably at that) Toledo Industrial Sewing Machine ltd.

Here we met Bob Kovar, owner and head repairman, who showed us around his warehouse full of sewing machines.

We finally settled on a wonderful refurbished Cutline 226r. We’ll be doing a post about this machine soon!

While we were in Toledo, we decided to spend the beautiful day walking around and look at some sights. One of those sights was the Toledo Museum of Art. Unfortunately, we picked the one day of the week that it was closed! Determined to spend time there, we just walked around the grounds, checking out the glass pavilion and the sculpture garden. We were sad not to see the interior of the pavilion (designed by SANAA in 2001), but there were a couple of students working in the glass blowing area, and that was fun to watch.

We were all set to just go home, when on the way back we caught a glimpse of a giant warehouse on the side of the road in Findlay, OH. Jade and I had never been to an antique store together and figured we ought to take the chance. We arrived there around 4:30pm and spent the next hour and a half browsing around and trying to check out as many of the hundred of booths that they had open before the doors closed at 6pm.
Most of the booths were unique, but all shared a similar time range of products. A couple of our favorite things in there were:

1. An old typewriter filled with obscene writing from visitors.
2. Some huge wooden mallets, bigger than Jade’s head.
3. Zombie Santa.
4. Old games and toys that we used to play with when we were little kids.

So, if you find yourself in Findlay, OH and have an hour or two to spare, make sure to visit Jeffery’s Antiques. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it!

Robert Cervas

I have always strived to do any and everything I can to improve whatever I’m involved in. It is very important to me to be able to deal whole-heartedly with the problem at hand, whether it be a handbag or a building