This is one of my ‘precious things’ of which I don’t have many that are inanimate. It’s my ancient Singer sewing machine and it’s seen the light of day today for one reason only – it’s been in the way of an electrician while he’s been working in our ‘glory hole’ – otherwise known as the hobbit’s cave.

We were chatting with Rich (electrician) the other day and he said that the three of them had agreed that the previous owners of our house were probably hobbits because they insisted on transforming everything to look less like a very nice old cottage, into a cave – a sort of middle-earth substitute for hobbits who couldn’t get home. I quite liked the analogy because I hate the way everything in the house has been clad in dark wood for no apparent reason other than so-called decoration.

Anyway, one of the caves is now a normal cupboard again and it has increased in size by four inches in both dimensions, as well as gaining some substantial extra height because for some weird reason whoever did this to the house had decided to put in a false joist, which when Rich tackled it with a hammer, he found it was just some cladding built around a frame – who on earth goes to the trouble of adding fake beams to the insides of cupboards?

I decided to photograph this once-lovely object because I’m in a frenzy of trying to capture unusual images because I had the exciting thrill of being accepted into a stock image library today – I passed their quality control tests and now my images are on sale to the world!

I know that this is only the first hurdle in this part of my photographic career because I know that I can only consider it a success when I receive a cheque from sales! However, I was given another great tip by my course convener the other week, which is that a good rule of thumb is to assume you will make £1 for every image in the library for every year you have the image available for sale.

Of course it’s not that straightforward because some images will sell over and over again and others won’t sell at all. So, with my commercial hat on, it doesn’t take much calculating to work out that to make a living at stock photography, you need to have a shed-load of pics in the libraries. I reckon that if I get my finger out, I may achieve 2,000 images online by Christmas – mostly from my archives.

So, that’ll keep me in toiletries for next year then! All I need to do then is get another load online and it’ll cover the food….then there’s the fuel, the mortgage, the car, the vet bills……oh – I think this means I’ll need to be generating gazillions of shots – it’s a good job I’m a stubborn old bird who won’t put her camera down.

My plan (though why I’m revealing this I don’t know) is to spend some time searching on images then trying to fill gaps – because that way if someone wants a picture of a widget, then I’ll stand a bigger chance of getting picked!

What’s the connection with the pic? Well, it’s an old manual sewing machine that’s been converted to electric by means of a bolt-on motor. Sort of like me really a manual old bird with a new lease of photographic life through digital!

Last year, I had no idea what was about to hit me!