The Story of the Sweatshop

A while back, I was posting pictures of my friend Anne and I working away on our quilts on a Monday afternoon. I must have been feeling whimsical, because I'd been referring to it as our sweatshop and so I put as the location "Glendora Sweatshop." Facebook actually took it and has since sort of made it a real place. Well, a virtual real place!

So for your edification and amusement, here's a current look at it:


Now of course it looks like a normal sewing desk/table setup (except that there are two machines, but any quilter will tell you that you HAVE to have more than one machine!)

But apparently a few people thought it was a real place, especially since the maps tend to put me a couple of streets over from my actual location. So here's the sad truth. It's all in my head. Well, and Anne's too. Plus we've made it a hashtag also.

Back in the day, I did have a job in a real sweatshop, a factory that made electronic parts. Our group made flybacks, which was the little gizmo inside the high-voltage box in your TV set that took your house voltage and amped it up to the high levels needed by TV sets--this was the summer of '59, so you can imagine the TVs I'm talking about! These pieces had to be dipped into vats of hot wax, which I got to inspect as they came out to be sure the heat and the jostling hadn't deformed them. If I passed them, they went to the woman who sat behind me, who ran them through another layer of hot wax to form a "tire" around their middles. With all the hot wax, as well as the steaminess of a factory built on a river (water power), and because a breeze could be disastrous for the wax, it was definitely a sweat shop. As I sometimes say, you can take the girl out of the mill town, but you can't always take the mill town out of the girl!

One more note. This post is actually a second experiment. I have another post, with 4 pictures, that I can't upload. The error message says to check my connection--which is working as well as it ever does. So this post has one picture, and I'm going to see if it posts. If you're seeing it, well, you'll know that it works with one picture! (I might also try an upload from the local coffeehouse.)

Now, back to work in the Sweatshop. Those tumblers aren't going to sew themselves!


-Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Glendora Sweatshop