SLO County craft museum is closing. And you can nab one of its antique sewing machines
How many auctions include more than 90 sewing machines in perfect working order, some of them more than a century old?
Staggered bid closures end at 9:21 p.m. Thursday in the month-long auction from Judy’s Sewing & Craft Museum in Morro Bay. The auction was being hosted on the SLO Cal Estate Auctions website.
The sale is equal parts craft history, museum quality and nostalgia for home economics classes of yore.
It also marks the end of a San Luis Obispo County crafting era: At 4 p.m., the craft museum, located at 350 Quintana Road, is expected to close its doors for good.
There are more than 225 auction lots from the museum in the sale, ranging from a SewHandy featherweight-style sewing machine from the late 1920s to dozens of other machines, toy sewing machines, spools, cabinets and even some groups of old Life magazines.
The bid for the SewHandy machine as of mid-morning Tuesday was already $480, but many bids for other goods were much lower and some items hadn’t yet gleaned any interest.
“It’s no surprise that people are grabbing up all the featherweights,” museum co-owner Harry Schenk said by phone Tuesday. “People are always looking for those machines. They’re very good machines, even though the last one was manufactured 1965.”
The auction site describes the sale as “a great opportunity to get a small piece of sewing history … (with) antique, vintage and toy sewing machines, and many sewing crafts from the Victorian and pioneer eras to the present.”
Morro Bay sewing and craft museum owners retiring
For the past eight years, Judy and Harry Schenk have been exhibiting those historical items in their second Morro Bay museum setting, where they wanted to spur more interest in the gentle arts of sewing and other “soft” crafts done by needle and loom.
“It was her dream to have a museum,” Harry Schenk said. “We’ve done it twice, once for about 3.5 years by the Post Office. Then we put everything away for quite a few years to travel.”
They reopened on Quintana Road in April 2019.
The Schenks recently decided it was time for some R&R — retirement and relaxation — although the word retire “should be in quotes,” the 85-year-old Harry Schenk joked.
The couple plans keep a few choice items from the museum, but want to do more traveling.
Judy Schenk will continue sewing and crafting, her husband said, especially decorative things for the home and simple clothes for their 19 grandchildren.
“I like to make things that are original, different ... things you can’t buy,” she said.
Items purchased in the action must be picked up from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, according to the website.
This story was originally published November 29, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
